An AI comedy experiment · v0.2
What this is: an experiment from techshu.ai in building internal comedy shows with AI, for use cases like town halls, offsites, onboarding and learning sessions. Meet our first AI comedian, Kishore “KPI” Kulkarni. His jokes, voice, timing and crowd are all generated.
Yes, we know the 3D version of KPI below looks a little like a robot. We started with a bad joke too. For the photoreal version, watch the pilot video.
techshu.ai presents
A 6-minute corporate stand-up set, live in 3D in your browser. Fourteen years, same company, same chair. Turn your sound on.
Seven bits, all original, built on the devices in the Comedy DNA tab. Each line carries its beat type, the expression and gesture KPI performs, the pause before it, and the crowd reaction. Press “Play from here” on any bit.
Every working comic can be broken into seven strands. Copying jokes gets you one show. Copying the strands gets you a character who can write new material every week.
Who is on stage. Status, age, job, one visible wound. McMillan is the engineer who loves data too much. KPI is the lifer who never got promoted.
The attitude every joke comes from. KPI: “The system is absurd, I know it, and I'm still here.” Resigned, never bitter.
Repeatable joke machines: the other side of the statistic, acronym re-expansion, jargon translation, literal logic, callback.
Setup → beat of silence → punch → tag → (later) callback. Punch word goes last. Tags keep the laugh rolling without a new setup.
Tempo, pauses, pitch. Slow down 10% into the punch, pause 0.6–0.9 s before it, drop pitch on the last word, then hold for the laugh.
Face and hands carry half the joke. Deadpan on the punch, raised eyebrow on the reframe, act-outs for characters (the boss, HR, the wife).
Punch up at systems, jargon and hierarchy. Every person in the room should think “that's my office,” and nobody in the room should be the target.
The Don McMillan “nerdy statistics” bit runs one engine all the way through: state a true number, then flip to the other side of it. Each joke follows the same four steps.
| Step | What he does | Example from the clip | Why it works |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Credibility | Insists the number is real | “These are actually true.” | The audience relaxes and trusts the premise, so the twist lands harder. |
| 2. Flip | Reads the complement or the inverse | 44% divorce → so 56% end in death | Correct maths, wrong emotion. The logic is airtight and the conclusion is horrifying. |
| 3. Absurd advice | Turns the logic into an action | Accidents near home → park a mile away | Takes the flip one step further into behaviour. |
| 4. Self-implicate | Turns the stat on himself | Women date funny guys → my wife thinks I'm ugly | The comic becomes the victim, so it stays likeable. |
Also note the word play in the closer (“suffer from” read as its opposite) and the act-outs (“Give me a quick pick”). KPI's survey bit and increment bit run this exact engine on HR data.
The joke you described is a bilingual acronym collision with an escalation. An English corporate title (L&D) is read aloud and lands on a Hindi word nobody says in a meeting. Then a colleague steps in to scold the comic for disrespect, and the correction lands on a second, worse collision (the wife who heads R&D). The engine: collision → authority figure objects → the objection contains a bigger collision.
It kills in a room of Hindi speakers because everyone recognises the sound and the comic never has to say the rude word. Use it with judgement at client-facing corporate events; it plays safest when the comic stays innocent and the audience “fills in” the word.
Style notes on public personas, for studying delivery. Watch the sets themselves; don't lift material.
| Comic | Persona | Signature engine | Borrow for KPI |
|---|---|---|---|
| Don McMillan (US) | Ex-engineer, clean corporate comic | Statistics flips, charts and PowerPoint as props (“Life After Death by PowerPoint”) | Slide/Excel props on a screen behind him |
| Rahul Subramanian | Ex-corporate, deadpan, low energy | Understated observation of jobs and middle-class life | The flat delivery on punchlines |
| Jeeveshu Ahluwalia | Clean corporate-show regular | Family and office observation for mixed-age crowds | Material that works in front of the CEO and interns together |
| Biswa Kalyan Rath | Engineer, rapid logic | Following a silly premise with strict logic | Escalation inside a single bit |
| Kenny Sebastian | Gentle, clean, musical | Small, relatable moments and physical act-outs | Warmth; never mean |
| David Brent (The Office, fictional) | Manager who thinks he's funny | Cringe and status gap | KPI's boss as an act-out character |
| Engine | Template | From the set |
|---|---|---|
| Other side of the statistic | “X% do A. Which means (100−X)% …” | 70% happy with manager → 30% didn't know it wasn't anonymous |
| Acronym re-expansion | Official meaning → the true meaning | KPI = Kishore, Permanently Interim · WFH = Wash, Fold, Help |
| Jargon translation | “When they say ___, it means ___.” | “Let's take this offline” = I have no answer and I'm going to lunch |
| Epic comparison | Tiny office thing ↔ huge cultural event | The Mahabharata started as a quick call |
| Money flip | Follow the numbers to a status reversal | 4% hike, 6% inflation → I'm an investor |
| Object callback | Plant an object early, promote it later | The chair: upgraded twice → got “exceeds” |
Topics ranked by how many people in a corporate room share the pain: appraisals and the bell curve · increments vs inflation · meetings and “quick calls” · email phrases · acronyms and jargon · HR surveys and fun Fridays · WFH and return-to-office · Bangalore/Gurgaon commute · notice periods · L&D trainings nobody finishes · town halls · AI taking jobs · Teams status “Away” · Excel and PowerPoint · US client calls at 11 pm · leave approvals.
44. Pune-born, Bengaluru-based. Associate Vice President, Strategic Alignment (Interim) at Synergex Global Services, a fictional IT-services firm. Fourteen years in, three reorgs survived.
Receding hairline with salt-and-pepper sides, rectangular black glasses, trimmed moustache. Navy blazer over a light-blue shirt, red company lanyard with ID card, a small paunch from the cafeteria samosas.
Indian English, mid-low pitch, unhurried. Talks like he is explaining something to a new joinee. Slows down into punchlines; says acronyms letter by letter; one “arre” or “yaar” per bit, no more.
Never promoted. He has made peace with it, mostly. The chair got upgraded; he got “realigned.” Every bit returns to this.
Wife Sunita, a school principal who has zero patience for corporate speak. Son in Class 9 who thinks his father “does calls.” Both are act-out characters.
His manager, Mr. Bhalla (“quick call?”), HR's Pinky (surveys, Fun Friday), and the intern who reports to him and earns more.
The 3D rig on stage has these built in. Each script line picks one expression and one gesture.
| Expression | Used for | Gesture | Used for |
|---|---|---|---|
| smile | Greeting, warm setups | wave | Walk-on, goodbye |
| deadpan | Most punchlines | open | Presenting a fact |
| smirk | Wordplay reveals | point | “You know this one” |
| skeptic | One eyebrow up, the flip | count | Lists and numbers |
| shock | Absurd conclusions | shrug | Resignation |
| worried | Appraisal, increment | facepalm | Disbelief |
| conspire | “Between us…” asides | lean | Leaning in to the crowd |
| proud | Fake victory | phone | Reading the boss's message |
| laugh | Breaking at a callback | away | Mic down while the room laughs |
Write one sentence per line. Start a line with ! for a punchline that gets a laugh, !! for a big laugh, + for applause. Optional [expression gesture] at the start, e.g. [skeptic point].
The pilot above was made from this page's script: one AI-generated portrait of KPI, a neural voice built phrase by phrase with timed pauses, a talking-face model that animates the portrait from the audio (lip-sync, blinks, head movement), and a crowd layered from real laughter and applause recordings, cut together with close-ups on punchlines.
The stage above runs live in the browser, so the character is stylised 3D. For a comedian who reads as a real person on Instagram or YouTube, move to this pipeline. The script, beats, expressions and laugh cues from this page carry straight over.
Tool landscape checked September 2026: Hedra Avatar · HeyGen lip-sync · HeyGen vs Hedra comparison