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    <abstract>Textual humor is enormously diverse and computational studies need to account for this range, including intentionally bad humor. In this paper, we curate and analyze a novel corpus of sentences from the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest to better understand “bad” humor in English. Standard humor detection models perform poorly on our corpus, and an analysis of literary devices finds that these sentences combine features common in existing humor datasets (e.g., puns, irony) with metaphor, metafiction and simile. LLMs prompted to synthesize contest-style sentences imitate the form but exaggerate the effect by over-using certain literary devices, and including far more novel adjective-noun bigrams than human writers.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Dark & Stormy: Modeling Humor in Sentences from the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest
%A Govindarajan, Venkata S.
%A Biester, Laura
%Y Liakata, Maria
%Y Moreira, Viviane P.
%Y Zhang, Jiajun
%Y Jurgens, David
%S Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)
%D 2026
%8 July
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C San Diego, California, United States
%@ 979-8-89176-391-3
%F govindarajan-biester-2026-dark
%X Textual humor is enormously diverse and computational studies need to account for this range, including intentionally bad humor. In this paper, we curate and analyze a novel corpus of sentences from the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest to better understand “bad” humor in English. Standard humor detection models perform poorly on our corpus, and an analysis of literary devices finds that these sentences combine features common in existing humor datasets (e.g., puns, irony) with metaphor, metafiction and simile. LLMs prompted to synthesize contest-style sentences imitate the form but exaggerate the effect by over-using certain literary devices, and including far more novel adjective-noun bigrams than human writers.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-short.42/
%P 501-510

Markdown (Informal)

[Dark & Stormy: Modeling Humor in Sentences from the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest](https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-short.42/) (Govindarajan & Biester, ACL 2026)

• Dark & Stormy: Modeling Humor in Sentences from the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest (Govindarajan & Biester, ACL 2026)

ACL

• Venkata S Govindarajan and Laura Biester. 2026. Dark & Stormy: Modeling Humor in Sentences from the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers), pages 501–510, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.