Cards Against LLMs: Benchmarking Humor Alignment in Large Language Models

Yousra Fettach, Guillaume Bied, Hannu Toivonen, Tijl De Bie


Abstract
Humor is one of the most culturally embedded and socially significant dimensions of human communication, yet it remains largely unexplored as a dimension of Large Language Model (LLM) alignment. In this study, five frontier language models play the same Cards Against Humanity games (CAH) as human players. The models select the funniest response from a slate of ten candidate cards across 9,894 rounds. While all models exceed the random baseline, alignment with human preference remains modest. More striking is that models agree with each other substantially more often than they agree with humans. We show that this preference is partly explained by systematic position biases and content preferences, raising the question whether LLM humor judgment reflects genuine preference or structural artifacts of inference and alignment.
Anthology ID:
2026.chum-1.4
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Computational Humor (CHum 2026)
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
Online
Editors:
Ori Amir, Christian F. Hempelmann, Julia Rayz, Tiansi Dong, Tristan Miller
Venues:
chum | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
51–64
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.chum-1.4/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yousra Fettach, Guillaume Bied, Hannu Toivonen, and Tijl De Bie. 2026. Cards Against LLMs: Benchmarking Humor Alignment in Large Language Models. In Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Computational Humor (CHum 2026), pages 51–64, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Cards Against LLMs: Benchmarking Humor Alignment in Large Language Models (Fettach et al., chum 2026)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.chum-1.4.pdf