Multi-Agent Comedy Club: Investigating Community Discussion Effects on LLM Humor Generation
Shiwei Hong, Lingyao Li, Ethan Z. Rong, Chenxinran Shen, Zhicong Lu
Abstract
Prior work has explored multi-turn interaction and feedback for LLM writing, but evaluations still largely center on prompts and localized feedback, leaving persistent public reception in online communities underexamined. We test whether broadcast community discussion improves stand-up comedy writing in a controlled multi-agent sandbox: in the discussion condition, critic and audience threads are recorded, filtered, stored as social memory, and later retrieved to condition subsequent generations, whereas the baseline omits discussion. Across 50 rounds (250 paired monologues) judged by five expert annotators using A/B preference and a 15-item rubric, discussion wins 75.6% of instances and improves Craft/Clarity (Δ = 0.440) and Social Response (Δ = 0.422), with occasional increases in aggressive humor.- Anthology ID:
- 2026.findings-acl.145
- Volume:
- Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2026
- Address:
- San Diego, California, United States
- Editors:
- Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
- Venue:
- Findings
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 2981–2998
- Language:
- URL:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.145/
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Shiwei Hong, Lingyao Li, Ethan Z. Rong, Chenxinran Shen, and Zhicong Lu. 2026. Multi-Agent Comedy Club: Investigating Community Discussion Effects on LLM Humor Generation. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026, pages 2981–2998, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Multi-Agent Comedy Club: Investigating Community Discussion Effects on LLM Humor Generation (Hong et al., Findings 2026)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.145.pdf