Your Wit is My Command - Tony Veale ***

This book had so much potential as a popular science title, but the way it is written limits its audience. Instead of being the fascinating narrative it could have been, it comes across as a textbook lite with a few popular science moments - so it is unlikely to really appeal to either audience. It was certainly hard going for a topic that should have been such fun.

What Tony Veale tries to do is understand and analyse the nature of jokes (the subtitle says sense of humour (well, humor), but the focus is primarily on jokes, which isn't quite the same thing) by looking at how computer software can be made to produce humorous text. There are some insights here, but the trouble is that it is necessary to wade through far too much description of what was necessary technically, which will only be of interest to computer scientists, and even when Veale is discussing what makes something funny, he relies on very stuffy-sounding theory which doesn't really chime with the general reader.

As an example of a limitation, although the subject is supposed to be a sense of humour, there is very little discussion of how this varies between people. For example, I hate The Office-style embarrassment humour, or humour that is dependent on someone getting physically hurt - but I know that some people love this. It would be interesting to know why. Equally, many of the examples in the book that are supposed to be funny really didn't chime with my sense of humour.

The whole exercise is not devoid of interest. I found the way that twitterbots could use material from Twitter to generate potentially funny tweets interesting, for example. But I think it would have been far better either to write a good popular science assessment of the possibilities (for which, I suspect, Veale would have needed a co-author) or to go full textbook on us. The hybrid approach simply didn't work.

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Review by Brian Clegg

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