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:
Bibkey:
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)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.145.pdf
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