“Boo, Get off the Stage!” Lessons from Robot Adaptation to Failed Jokes in a Robot Comedy Experiment that Compared Different Room-Reading Techniques

Public-facing social robots, including robotic comedians, need to recognize onlooker reactions and repair failures when an interaction falls flat. In the presented work, we use stand-up comedy as a structured and fast-paced testbed to partially address this broader challenge of perceiving and adapting to failures; the robot can deliver a silly joke, observe an immediate audience response, and select an appropriate follow-up within a short interaction loop. We compare three room-reading strategies for informing post-joke adaptation by a fully autonomous NAO robot comedian. The strategies use crowd audio cues, visual facial reactions, or spoken audience feedback to select repair-oriented responses. We evaluated these three condition approaches in 19 total live performances (split between conditions) with \(N\) =80 total participants and measured experience using performance-level joke ratings, perceived social closeness, and social attribute ratings, along with post-performance group interviews. Across conditions, outcomes were broadly positive and we found no statistically significant differences between strategies, which suggests that each modality can support viable adaptation while capturing different forms of audience engagement. The study's manipulation check and interviews also showed that presumed robot adaptivity mode mattered, especially for the verbal strategy, which could be compelling when audiences engaged but was less reliably recognized when groups were quiet. This work supports flexible room-reading tactics for failure repair in public-facing robots while highlighting the importance of making a robot's adaptive behavior understandable in the moment.