Michael Wong Kam
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2025-06

Robot Comedy Performance #2

Stand-up comedy by a robot · Creative Robotics Performance Stage, London

Performance 02 at the Peckham Road Lecture Theatre: the host in a white coat and wig beside the robot, audience in tiered seats. Nearby faces are blurred.

01Details

Date
Event
Creative Robotics Performance Stage · UAL Creative Computing Institute
Venue
Peckham Road Lecture Theatre, University of the Arts London
Audience
c. 60
Personas
3 — Neutral / British / JapaneseqtComedian · Jackerbot · Hirobot
Model
gpt-4o-mini
Platform
QTrobot (LuxAI) · ROS
Added
Props, narrative staging

02Stage

Screen Robot Host PC Audience Camera
Stage layout — performance 02

03Clips

From the audience — 1Performance 2 · 0:20
From the audience — 2Performance 2 · 0:20
From the audience — 3Performance 2 · 0:14

Phone recordings from the audience, cropped to the stage.

04Personas

  • Neutral

    qtComedian

    Creative, clever, cute and very friendly; jokes from a robot's point of view

    Being a robot

  • British

    Jackerbot

    Dry, sarcastic, self-deprecating · the Jester and the Everyman

    Social absurdity, awkwardness, weather · “mate”, “cheers”, “bloody”, “chuffed”

  • Japanese

    Hirobot

    Storytelling and community-rooted humour · the Jester and the Sage

    Technology vs. tradition, family, love, social irony in Japan · Japanese–English switching: “sugoi”, “yabai”, “maji de”

05Laughter, annotated

Every utterance in performance 02, annotated by hand from the video: when it was said, how many people laughed, and for how long.

  • Laughter intensity
  • No laughter for 20 s or more
  • Robot line
  • Host

Bar height: number of people laughing (1–2 · 3–4 · 5+). Bar width: length of the laugh.

06System

  1. 01

    Listen

    Speech recognition on the robot turns the host's question into text

  2. 02

    Respond

    A language model answers in persona, keeping the last five turns as memory

  3. 03

    Read

    Each sentence is scored for emotion (text2emotion)

  4. 04

    Perform

    The robot speaks, shows a matching face on its screen and plays a gesture

Persona prompts were written by a second prompt that looks at a comedian through eight lenses:

  1. archetype
  2. attitude
  3. likeability
  4. shadow
  5. struggle
  6. status
  7. self-awareness
  8. the act's look

07Documentation

  • The host in a yellow coat and white wig on a red-lit stage.
    Host
  • QTrobot close up on a stand before the performance.
    QTrobot
  • The empty Peckham Road Lecture Theatre with red tiered seats.
    Peckham Road Lecture Theatre
  • Event poster: Creative Robotics Performance Stage, 20th June 2025, UAL Creative Computing Institute.
    Event poster

08Papers

  1. 2026-05Laughing across cultures: culturally sensitive robotic stand-up comedian with multimodal expressiveness

09Recordings

Full recordings available on request

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