COMIC: Agentic Sketch Comedy Generation

2026-03-11

AI Summary

This work proposes a fully automated method for generating high-quality, diverse short comedic skit videos. By constructing a multi-agent collaborative system that emulates real-world film production workflows, the approach enables role-specific task assignment, iterative refinement, and competitive evaluation. A key innovation is the integration of a large language model critic trained on YouTube audience preferences to automatically align with and assess humor effectiveness. Combining large language models, a multi-agent framework, and video generation techniques, the method achieves near-professional levels in creativity, diversity, and comedic quality, significantly outperforming existing approaches and establishing state-of-the-art performance in automated comedic video synthesis.

Technology Category

Natural Language Processing: GenerationHumans and AI: Human-Aware Planning and Behavior PredictionCognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Computational Creativity

Application Category

Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Cost models of using LLMs in production systemsSemantics and Knowledge: Data modeling to support human-machine intelligence, including LLMs agents, intelligent system behavior, explanations, and user-friendly interactionsSocial Networks and Social Media: Generative AI / large language models and their impact on social systems

Abstract

We propose a fully automated AI system that produces short comedic videos similar to sketch shows such as Saturday Night Live. Starting with character references, the system employs a population of agents loosely based on real production studio roles, structured to optimize the quality and diversity of ideas and outputs through iterative competition, evaluation, and improvement. A key contribution is the introduction of LLM critics aligned with real viewer preferences through the analysis of a corpus of comedy videos on YouTube to automatically evaluate humor. Our experiments show that our framework produces results approaching the quality of professionally produced sketches while demonstrating state-of-the-art performance in video generation.

Problem

• AI-generated comedy
• sketch video generation
• automated humor evaluation
• LLM-based critics
• creative AI agents

Innovation

• agentic system
• LLM critics
• comedy generation
• automated video production
• humor evaluation