Double entendres have been making us laugh since the days of Chaucer and Shakespeare, but up until now computers weren’t in on the joke. Chloé Kiddon and Yuriy Brun, two computer scientists at the University of Washington, have developed a system for recognising a particular type of double entendre – the “that’s what she said” joke, in which seemingly innocent sentences can be transformed into lewd utterances by appending just four short words.
The pair describe the “TWSS problem” as recognizing when it is funny to follow a sentence with “that’s what she said” – they give “Don’t you think these buns are a little too big for this meat?” as one example.