Dear Mr. Greer: Your Jokes Have Been Flagged as 94% Possibly Not Human
Dear Mr. Greer: Your Jokes Have Been Flagged as 94% Possibly Not Human
Your third joke was funny. This is the most serious flag of all.
APPLICANT: Ethan Greer
EVENT: LaughProof™ Open Night — Third Tuesday of the Month (Pending Venue Confirmation)¹
VENUE: TBD²
Dear Mr. Greer,
Thank you for your submission to LaughProof™, New York's only comedy night committed to the verification of genuine human funniness.
After a thorough review of your submitted material by our Humor Authenticity Panel, our proprietary detection software, HaHagram 2.1, has flagged your jokes as 94% possibly not human. This is not an accusation. It is a probability.
We noted the following areas of concern:
Your opening joke employed a setup followed by a punchline. This structure is consistent with patterns observed in machine-generated comedic output. Authentic human humor, as defined by our panel, typically trails off, loses the thread, or pivots unexpectedly to a story about the comedian's mother. Yours did not.
Your second joke used the phrase "and yet." HaHagram 2.1 flags "and yet" at a rate of 100% in all comedic submissions reviewed since March. We do not know what this means. Our engineers are looking into it.
Your third joke was funny. This is the most serious flag of all. HaHagram 2.1 has reviewed 4,200 open mic submissions in the past calendar year. Statistically, human comedians are funny approximately 3% of the time. Your submission exceeded this threshold by a margin our system considers suspicious.
We also observed the use of a rhetorical pause — indicated in your submission by three dots — which HaHagram 2.1 associates with what our researchers call "performed timing." Authentic human comedians, in our experience, do not have timing.
Please be advised that LaughProof™ does not make accusations. We issue findings. Our finding is that you write like a robot pretending to be funny, which is categorically different from a human being who is actually funny, and also different from a robot that is actually funny, which remains, to date, undetected.³
You are welcome to appeal this decision by submitting a 400-word handwritten essay on why you are human. The essay will be run through HaHagram 2.1. Results are final.
We wish you well in your future comedic endeavors, provided they are authentic.
Reginald P. Foss
Director of Comedic Integrity
LaughProof™ — Authenticated Human Expression Partners, LLC
¹ Venue confirmation pending resolution of a separate dispute with the building, which has asked us to stop calling it a venue.
² See footnote 1.
³ One submission in 2023 remains under review.
Aaron Rose is the founder and publisher of Tech Reader Magazine, covering system architecture, cloud platforms, and AI policy.