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Comedy, Creativity, Agency: The Hybrid Individual

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The Creative System in Action

Abstract

Graeme Ritchie stated, ‘there is little doubt that the construction of humor is generally regarded as creative … and any general theory of creativity should have something to say about humor’ (2009, p. 71). If we define humour as the ability to perceive or express the intentional or unintentional comic elements of life, and comedy as an intentionally structured cultural product, then any general theory of creativity should have something to say about the creation and performance of comedy rather than of humour in general. To examine the relationship between creativity and comedy, this research project scrutinized the creative structures and processes of an award-winning comedy duo. The duo, called the Atomic Playboy and the Radiation Romeo, perform a vaudevillian ‘Two-Act’ (Cullen 2007, Page 1915). What marks Atomic and Romeo as an unusual case is that they are not human, they are small artificial intelligence (AI) agents — chat-bots.

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Authors
  1. Michael Meany
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Newcastle, Australia

    Phillip McIntyre  & Janet Fulton  & 

  2. Monash University, Australia

    Elizabeth Paton

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© 2016 Michael Meany

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Meany, M. (2016). Comedy, Creativity, Agency: The Hybrid Individual. In: McIntyre, P., Fulton, J., Paton, E. (eds) The Creative System in Action. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137509468_13

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