Can we use a computer to identify jokes? Or to identify what’s likely to be a good joke, rather than a bad joke? In this talk, Dafna Shahaf discusses a data-science project on which she worked with the New Yorker magazine, looking to identify potentially funny cartoon captions faster and more reliably than a human reader. What aspects of a cartoon’s caption is likely to make it funnier? Is it possible to automatically identify funnier captions? The preliminary results are promising — and even if you’re not convinced by the algorithms, at least you’ll get a chance to read some cartoons, and call it work.