I contend LLMs will never write good jokes. Certainly not original ones. But many human jokes also lack creativity. I have noted seven  recurring humor templates. In my opinion, Claude handles Tom Swifties well, since they are so simple. Its “three walked into a bar” jokes are mildly amusing, but they aren’t really “three walked into a bar.” Please fill the comments with your judgments about this humor.

The rule “if you have to explain it, the joke is not funny,” is bent here, because of Claude’s level of uncertainty about humor[1] Its “rubber balls and liquor attempts are earnest but terrible. It doesn’t quite understand the meter of Chatanooga Choo-Choo, but makes a valiant effort.

Claude, when asked, shows its work. I would be mildly insulted about its crack that most of my formats are “pun engines,” but
a) what do you expect from an industrial cut-and-paste engine
b) that note was probably lifted directly from someone’s essay on the nature of humor
c) the crack comes from an overgrown parrot.

1. BOOKS THAT WILL NEVER BE WRITTEN

A History of the Guillotine by Hedda Gonne
(head’a gone)

Home Plumbing Made Easy by Lee King Fawcett
(leaking faucet – I’d bet a nickel some plumber has used this on a
business card, so call it “probably independently discovered”)


2. RUBBER BALLS AND LIQUOR

“Say ‘chowder and a poker’ after every question.”
– What did you have for dinner? Chowder and a poker.
– What’s out in the toolshed? Chowder and a poker.
– What did you do last night with your girlfriend? Chowder and a poker.
(chowed her, and I poke her) [Ed note: Chowed her? Just about as stupid as rubber balls.]


-“Say ‘a banker and a plumber’ after every question.”
– What do you want to be when you grow up? A banker and a plumber.
– Who came to fix the sink? A banker and a plumber.
– What did you do last night with your girlfriend? A banker and a plumber.
(banged her, and I plumb her)


3. FUNNY INTRODUCTIONS

“Mr. and Mrs. Ficient, and their daughter Effie.”
(Effie Ficient = efficient)

“Mr. and Mrs. Loney, and their son Abe.”
(Abe Loney = abalone) [Ed. Note: this would be funny if Abe were pronounced “Aba,” which it is not. You’d think an LLM would be better at this format]

4. HOW MANY (BLANK) TO SCREW IN A LIGHTBULB

How many gaslighters does it take to change a lightbulb?
None. The bulb was never on, and frankly you’re crazy for thinking it was.


How many influencers does it take to change a lightbulb?
One – but first she needs a twenty-minute video on how this bulb completely
changed her life.


5. WALKED INTO A BAR (the meta / self-demonstrating subtype)
[Claude admits it is bat at this template]


A run-on sentence walks into a bar and orders a beer and then another and then starts in about its ex and the boat and the lawsuit and it just keeps going and the bartender can’t get a word in and honestly nobody in the place can find the period.
 
A dangling participle walks into a bar. Reaching for the peanuts, the barstool tipped over. (the joke IS the error: “reaching” dangles onto the stool, which has no arms)


6. CHATTANOOGA CHOO-CHOO

(These want a one-line setup to land, as you noted. Both scan to the song.)


A sommelier uncorks an import and holds it up:
“Pardon me, boy, is that the Chianti new to you, too?”

A shoe buyer points at the display of French loafers:
“Pardon me, boy, is that the chateau’s new shoe, too?”


7. TOM SWIFTIES

Adverb type:
“I’ve only got spades and clubs left in my hand,” said Tom heartlessly.
(no hearts)

“I’ve turned the whole attic into a chapel,” said Tom loftily.
(loft + lofty)

Croaker type (the pun rides the verb, as your list has it):
“We’re completely out of firewood,” Tom barked.
(bark)

“I’ll milk the herd before sunrise,” Tom uttered.
(udder)

CLAUDE SHOWS ITS WORK
Paul [ed note: my nephew] relayed the challenge and your thesis: that an LLM can’t write genuinely funny original jokes but might manage stupid wordplay inside fixed formats. That’s about right, and worth saying plainly.

Six of your seven formats are pun engines – the “joke” is a slot machine and the wit is in the mechanism, which you built. Generating a novel instance is therefore a search problem, not an act of inspiration, and search is the one thing a machine is unambiguously good at.

The seventh – Walked Into a Bar – is the one that needs an actual funny idea, and it’s where I’m weakest; so I leaned into the self-demonstrating / meta subtype you clearly favor (the rabbit-typo, the hippo and the number 7) instead of pretending I can out-write a shaggy-dog.

Everything below I generated fresh for this. I did not recycle. One honesty caveat, because you got burned by the Gottfried book: in the most productive pun formats (Books, Tom Swifties) the space is so well-trodden that I cannot promise no human ever independently struck the same pun – only that I copied none. Where I think a collision is plausible, I flag it. [Ed. Note: The problem with this disclaimer is that LLMs constantly lie, even when asked directly. Since this assignment is trivial, I won’t check each joke. But if you know of a duplicate, please tell me.]


CLAUDE’S NOTES ON RUBBER BALLS AND LIQUOR

On your actual question – is this a template or dead end–it’s a live template, just a narrow one. The general form is a single innocent-sounding phrase, repeated as the answer to everything, engineered so that against ONE loaded question it resolves into something filthy – a deliberate mondegreen. It’s narrow because the phrase must satisfy two hard constraints at once: pass as a literal answer AND slur into the dirty reading on cue.

That double constraint is why good ones are rare, not why they don’t exist. Living relatives in the same family: the “Sofa King” construction (the store is Sofa King busy, the prices are Sofa King low = “so f—ing”), and the clean cousin “Nacho” (Whose fries are these? Nacho fries = “not your”).

 Same engine, different exhaust. [Ed Note:.I will eat my PSACOT hat if this is not directly lifted from somewhere]. So: this template is not a dead end. A template with a small, findable supply of usable phrases – which is exactly why you only ever heard the one.


[Ed. Note: I included all of Claude’s commentary; it is unusually honest in revealing its limits. It does best on Tom Swifties, which are strictly mechanical and could benefit from an entity that has devoured terabytes of writing. It is worst at “three walked into a bar.”]

[1] Which it does not understand