Humor explanation
One project surfaced the mechanisms, references, context, and likely audience behind a joke.
Completed community hackathon
Build with Gemma: Humor Genome NYC
Seven projects explored how open models can understand, create, organize, and support comedy, audiences, and performance.
7 submissions 3 award winners 2 honorable mentions $1,500 awarded
What this was
A creative-tech hackathon for AI and comedy.
Humor Genome NYC was a Build with Gemma community hackathon for builders, comedians, designers, researchers, writers, and curious people exploring the intersection of AI and comedy.
The event was an online-first community hackathon hosted through kaggle. It remained fully online; there was no live session or in-person event.
It was not about replacing comedians. It explored how open models could help study, organize, test, explain, and expand how humor works.
Why humor
Humor is one of the hardest and most human tests for open models.
Humor is timing, context, culture, surprise, risk, and shared understanding. That makes it one of the most interesting places to test open AI models.
Humor Genome NYC explored what AI could reveal about joke structure, audience fit, creative iteration, performance context, and the messy human signals behind what makes something funny.
Timing Context Culture Surprise Audience Shared understanding
What participants built
Seven different approaches to AI and humor.
Audience simulation
Projects modeled how distinct audience personas might react to the same comedy material.
Performance feedback
A prototype compared material and observed laughter with predicted humor beats to produce practical notes.
Creative humor tools
A modular workbench supported creating, explaining, adapting, analyzing, and performing humor.
Audience-context experiments
A focused notebook tested one joke with four simulated audiences and adapted it for a colder room.
Humor-intelligence systems
Projects mapped humor dimensions, evaluated patterns, and compared model analysis with human feedback.
Who the event was for
Curiosity mattered more than a title.
The event welcomed AI builders, Kaggle users, comedians, writers, designers, product people, researchers, students, and anyone curious about humor and creative technology.
Participants did not need to be professional comedians or experienced Kaggle competitors.
AI builders Kaggle users Comedians Writers Designers Product people Researchers Students Mentors
Timeline
The hackathon is complete.
Hackathon launch
Builders joined through Kaggle, explored ideas, and began creating projects with Gemma.
Building period
Participants developed notebooks, applications, experiments, analysis tools, and demos around AI and humor.
July 26, 2026
Submissions closed after a 24-hour extension from the original July 25, 2026 deadline. Seven projects were submitted.
Organizer review
Projects were reviewed for meaningful use of Gemma, relevance to humor and comedy, prototype quality, clarity, originality, and what each project demonstrated or taught. There was no community vote.
Results and project showcase
Three official award winners and two honorable mentions were selected. All seven submissions are preserved on the public results page.
Results showcase
Seven submissions now have a permanent public home.
Explore the three official award winners, two honorable mentions, demo videos, Kaggle writeups, and the complete seven-project directory.
- Humor Creation Award · $500 Humor Genome Studio
- Humor Understanding Award · $500 Killjoy: the AI that explains why it's funny
- Human + AI Performance Award · $500 Why'd They Laugh? - An Audience Focused Feedback System
- Honorable mentions LaughLensAI · Room Sense Text: Same Joke, Four Gemma Audiences
3
Official award winners
2
Honorable mentions
7
Projects in the full directory
$1,500
Awarded across the three official tracks
Explore the completed work
Follow the projects from idea to prototype.
See the results
Meet the three official award winners and two honorable mentions, with contribution-based recognition for each.
View the ResultsRead every writeup
The Kaggle competition remains the primary source for all seven project submissions.
Visit the Kaggle CompetitionBrowse the full directory
Compare the different approaches to explanation, audience context, creative tooling, and performance feedback.
Browse All Seven ProjectsThank you
Built by a broader community.
Thank you to the seven project teams, along with the creative technologists, comedians, designers, writers, mentors, and event helpers who contributed to Humor Genome NYC.
The results page keeps the submitted work and the full builder community at the center.
Review approach
How projects were reviewed
Projects were considered based on meaningful use of Gemma, relevance to humor and comedy, the quality and clarity of the demonstrated prototype, and what the project revealed or enabled.
The original three tracks remain the official awards. Each winner is also recognized for the specific contribution that distinguished the project within the broader challenge.
Selections were made through organizer review.
Meaningful use of Gemma
Connection to humor, comedy, audience, or performance
Working demo or clear prototype
Clarity and originality
What the project demonstrated or taught
About Gemma
Open models in a creative, cultural, human domain.
Gemma is a family of lightweight, state-of-the-art open models from Google, built from the same research and technology used to create the Gemini models. Humor Genome NYC used the Build with Gemma community hackathon format to explore what open models could do in a creative, cultural, and highly human domain.
Organizer
Hosted by Humor Genome NYC.
Humor Genome NYC was a public Kaggle community competition that received seven submissions and concluded after the final submission deadline on July 26, 2026.
It was organized as part of the broader Humor Genome and Midtown Show ecosystem.