@inproceedings{turgeman-etal-2026-one,
    title = "One Joke to Rule them All? On the (Im)possibility of Generalizing Humor Detection",
    author = "Turgeman, Mor  and
      Shani, Chen  and
      Shahaf, Dafna",
    editor = "Amir, Ori  and
      Hempelmann, Christian F.  and
      Rayz, Julia  and
      Dong, Tiansi  and
      Miller, Tristan",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Computational Humor ({CH}um 2026)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "Online",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.chum-1.1/",
    pages = "1--28",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-431-6",
    abstract = "Humor is a complex form of communication that remains challenging for machines. Despite its broadness, most existing research on computational humor traditionally focused on modeling one specific type of humor. In this work, we wish to understand whether competence on specific humor tasks confers any ability to transfer to novel, unseen types; in other words, is this fragmentation inevitable? This question is especially timely as new humor types continuously emerge in online contexts (e.g., memes, anti-humor, AI fails). If LLMs are to keep up with this evolving landscape, they must be able to capture deeper, transferable mechanisms. To investigate this, we conduct a series of transfer learning experiments across four datasets, representing different humor tasks. We explore varied diversity settings (varying between 1-3 datasets in training, testing on a novel one). Experiments show that models are capable of some transfer, reaching up to 75{\%} accuracy on binary unseen datasets; training on diverse sources improves transferability (1.88-4.05{\%}) with minimal-to-no drop in in-domain performance. Somewhat surprisingly, the one dataset (Dad Jokes) emerges as the best enabler of transfer, but the hardest one to transfer to. We release data and code."
}