What's the Deal With Robot Comedy? Pinpointing the Impact of Post-Joke Repartee in a Robotic Comedian's Performance

The rise in prevalence of AI-enabled technologies (from voice assistants to social robots) has not yet been accompanied by an analogous mastery of computer-mediated humor. Although humans often use jokes to repair interactions and navigate uncomfortable scenarios, social robots in similar roles typically fall short at reading the room and adapting behavior according to sensed social contexts and reactions. We pursued two studies to gain clearer evidence about adaptive robot joking's influence (compared to hardcoded repartee or no robot banter). The first study (<inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$N = 48$</tex-math></inline-formula>, between-subjects design) examined in-person one-on-one human-robot interactions across the three conditions. The results indicated that adaptive repartee by robots tended to increase perceived warmth, competence, comfort, social closeness feelings, and humorousness, and that human behavioral responses varied significantly between conditions, with any repartee leading to significant gains over no repartee. The second study used an online video-based survey with a within-subjects design (<inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$N = 99$</tex-math></inline-formula>) to examine the same conditions. This follow-up effort showed significant gains in perceived competence and anthropomorphism for any type of repartee, although this banter also made the robot more discomforting. Our work can help practitioners who are interested in applying playful banter to enhance robot charm and success.