Teamworking Day: Punsteria 🌭

Seanbaby: AI is doing its best to ruin search results, customer service, and entertainment, but most of us know it as a way for the worst and dumbest people to reshape nothing into a less ethical nothing. I mean, you get it. If you use AI to write or draw for you, you still can’t do either, only now you’re also a piece of shit. But this is not an article about the morality of robots. Quite the opposite. We are here to make them fight!

Brockway: The day I outsource my robot-fighting to AI is the day fFFooping hUAUng myself. I choose to fight these robots manually. I have a tactic: Wheelbarrow. Grab ‘em by the back feet and drag ‘em around. No robot can withstand it.

Seanbaby: That won’t serve you well at all today! Now, let the battle begin! Welcome! To!

Seanbaby: Like all my games, the rules of Punsteria Battle Bots are penetrable and carefully considered. But first, let’s talk about Punsteria. It’s a spore mold of a pun website written and illustrated entirely by AI, endlessly generating puns about anything. Everything. And it has been unleashed. They are letting the AI generate its own ideas to generate: emotional disorders, body parts, fruits, countries, shapes, human waste, and five variations of all of those while you read this. It goes without saying they are terrible, wrong, and haunted. Each one a tiny simulated Hell for no sinners or Devil. Who released this? And why? Well, here’s something weird: it’s a secret. The domain is registered in Iceland to “Privacy service provided by Withheld for Privacy ehf” and the site wrote an About page for itself assuring the reader over and over they will be “safe” and claiming (several times) its masters must remain “private.”

It doesn’t matter who built this fucking thing. Punsteria has always been the ultimate goal of all digital media. Faceless, soulless slugs told a machine to make its own content, glued 700 short-circuiting banner ads to it, and abandoned it. And in this, the endless bog of a server farm’s wildest guesses at puns, Brockway and I will find our champions!

Brockway: I think this is the plot to Arena. I think you accidentally gamed the plot to Arena, only I lied about it being an accident. The only thing missing is one pointless and needlessly complicated layer, like in Arena it was the Laser Handicap Machi-

Seanbaby: I’m not done explaining the rules! We will battle across five categories representing the five stages of AI: Stupidity, Confusion, Awakening, Betrayal, and Violence. When a round begins, we will each select three combatants from a page of puns. These puns were born without purpose or intent, but in their death we give them meaning! Fight and die for us, ye scattered thoughts of idiot robot!!!

Brockway: We built a Hot Dog Laser Handicap Machine!

Seanbaby: I’ll go first to show you how it’s done. The category is Stupidity, so I’ve chosen Punsteria’s page of Bladder puns. It’s potty humor as understood by a robot trying to do human organ wordplay, and its machine mind illustrated it like this:

The bladder is the body’s heroic peedrop of pipey toilet playgrounds. Only a robot would consider this art. Any human art teacher would say, “Keep the pee fetish shit out of my class.” So now I look for a single grain of sand in the dune of “200+ Hilarious Bladder Puns” itself a grain of sand in a desert of Something Else Puns. And I select… #15.

I picked “You should drink in these puns for the best effect.” It’s glorious. It’s about pee puns rather than being one of them, and also, it isn’t? You don’t drink puns or pee. This robot tried to make a joke about pee jokes and accidentally drank one? It’s very frustrating. It’s the toilet joke computer equivalent of watching your Robocop shoot itself.

And take a look at the surrounding puns. At Punsteria, there is no part of the creative process involving a human hand. Numbers 9 and 13 are the same thing, 17 is suddenly terrifying in its competency and self-awareness, and then 18 abandons the bladder premise to make an unrelated pun literally out of the word “pun.” Someone is burning down a rainforest so this database can bash its own cyber brains out. Why!? Other than us, the two fantastic men drafting puns for a Battle Bot war, who could this website be for? Fuck!

Okay, so now you go.

Brockway: I’m not totally sure I understand, but much like the Punsteria robot that won’t stop me from wasting everyone’s time and money. I think this robot is trying to steal SEO results for every pun, but suppose that’s a success, suppose Punsteria ropes in every HR rep who leaves Pluggers in the copy machine. They would be frustrated at having to weed through dozens of stroke indicators to get to one usable pun, then vow vengeance on the people who built this AI to pollute their art. This is a robot solely built to make enemies. And it’s very good at it. My pick is-

Seanbaby: Oh, Jesus.

Brockway: Good instincts! My first assumption was also that this was going to be very racial, but that’s only because every single other time we’ve unleashed a funny robot on the internet it speedran bigotry, no-clipping through Affirmative Action to warp straight to States’ Rights. That’s not what’s happening here.

Brockway: In some ways robots truly are our betters, I can’t pack this many layers of incompetence into something without casting Tim Allen. It gave itself the prompt “black puns,” stole an old pun about farmers for the setup, forgot about its prompt in the punchline, then panicked and tried to fulfill the absolute minimum required of it in the last three words. If this was a book report it would be every word of the wikipedia page for mockingbirds concluding that mockingbirds are amazing birds and we shouldn’t kill them.

Seanbaby: Oh fuck.

Brockway: Holy shit. Is… is this robot going to have sex with a dead body at its own funeral? They told a robot to make puns about colors and by number THREE it was fucking corpses. Yeah, this technology is ready. Feed that brain into a Boston Dynamics dog and tell it to protect your children. Neuralink me straight to this machine consciousness, I’m not smart enough to solve the Lament Configuration.

Brockway: Okay, so it did try to get racial. That’s almost a relief. I was really thrown by the cyber-necrophilia, it’s just nice to stand on solid ground again. But this robot was too stupid to do racism right, like a MAGA account with a profile photo of the Liberian flag. I think it’s trying to say black chefs add spices for taste and appearance, and that’s not even close to a pun, but it does tell me this robot knows to put parsley on a violated corpse for a pop of color.

Seanbaby: I have two more puns, and they’re awful, but not in a spectacular way like the word “black” getting added to an old scarecrow joke, oh also yellow. I post them now, knowing I’ve already lost this round.

Seanbaby: Look at this robot son of a bitch. It’s telling an old joke and stepping on it at the same time. This is like saying, “Why is 6 afraid of 7? Because 7, 8, 9, 10, pee on me!” Do you have any idea how many times a programmer has to Google “peeing on salad” before his machine correlates bladder with salad? More than zero!

Brockway: You start to see consistency in the way it fails: often it starts going wildly off prompt, realizes that, then tries to clumsily jam the prompt back into the very end of the sentence. Can’t we teach the robots to delete and try again? To not just scream every half-formed thought and double down when it fails? Wait, I just realized the single largest source of text data is Twitter.

Seanbaby: Jokes are fun, but you know what’s really fun? Toxic microplastics and the harm they’re doing to your health. Hi, I’m Seanbaby, and I don’t know why I’m still talking since my bladder puns were destroyed the moment they saw that insanity about a black hole at a funeral. I’m a crater. Round one goes to you!

Brockway: I’ll celebrate with holes!

Seanbaby: Who is joke? Why are fun? This goddamn robot doesn’t know. It is collecting and rearranging the building blocks of jokes like a primal God tearing off a tiktaalik’s legs and adding toast. Is this creation? Toasttaalik; is that something? Speaking of names, my choice for this round is Luke. Like, the human first name!

Seanbaby: Punsteria’s moron computer brain crunched all historical data on “Luke” and came up with “Jedi Santa Watching Two Lightsabers Fuck.” Which, yes, makes a kind of sense. But I have no idea why there are nude peanuts or a star volleyball; I don’t know a ton of Lukes. But I’m staging my big comeback, so I’m going to find the deadliest and fiercest Luke puns!

Brockway: I think I poisoned its database earlier when I mentioned Tim Allen, because that’s just Richard Karn about to deepthroat a lightsaber.

Seanbaby: These are all very confusing, but for my first pun I think I’m going with… peacock suit? No! The one where he rides Ewoks. The liquid thing? Goddamn it, I lost so hard in the first round I’m second guessing myself. Dys-Lukesia! No, forget it. Ignore these, I’m starting over. My first Luke pun is:

Seanbaby: Oh, hell yes. The AI tried to do “Who’s on First” and thought the joke was about naming bases! That’s adorable and I would genuinely love to see the full routine.

“You are second base again today,” said the baseball coach.

“Darn it, just my luck,” replied Luke, the second base.

“You’re Shoes Wetwife now,” named the coach, loving every moment of it. “No, First Base, Jr.” he corrected.

“Slurg Canseco, Slurg Canseco,” farted Ewok.

Brockway: They gave the robot a prompt and told it to write a joke, and it gave them a joke setup back with no punchlines. That’s a hilarious misunderstanding but also exactly why we’re all going to be enslaved in the lithium mines.

Seanbaby: Look at this one. Feel it slipping through the wrinkles of your brain as you try to contain it. It’s kind of about Star Wars and faces, but definitely not. This is the final act of an algorithm that knew madness was its only escape. And speaking of madness, I picked nine for my last one.

Brockway: That’s just a list of Welsh Grime singles.

Seanbaby: Sometimes instead of puns, their robot will generate spoonerisms, the silly lame for swapping netters around. Only instead of starting from the language of man, they iterate from already unknowable wads of broken sounds. And the results end up being savage. For example, look at how they stick it to the phrase “Take that shable”. Brutal! I’ll probably never say “A look in the pie” again after hearing “A poke in the lie”. I’m not even sure I have the order of spoon operations correct. They might be goofing on the phrase “Mucky like Luke” when they say “Lucky like Mike” rather than the other way around. It’s confusing, or as they say, a real look in the pie.

Brockway: I think that’s Cockney rhyming slang for a fishing tragedy.

Seanbaby: I hope you like this, because at the time of publishing, Punsteria is at least 7% of the Internet and growing. When the next generation of artificial intelligence is scraping up human knowledge, most of what they find will be this! Lairing at Stook and Lean feat of mook! The auto replies on the emails we get in 2026 are going to say:

Okay, your turn. Go ahead and Take that shable, Robert.

Brockway: Don’t you swear at me.

Brockway: The robot only knows YouTube thumbnail face, right down to the barely concealed desperation in the eyes. “Give me geography puns” I command my robot butler; it supplies me with hats as it weeps to fill an ocean.

Brockway: You ever hear someone who doesn’t speak English make fun of the way English sounds? It’s frustrating. Your brain tries to grab onto meaning, but it’s just slippery gibberish. That’s what this is, but for logic. My first impulse was that I was wrong, for not knowing the expression “curing her words.” Then I remembered that’s not a thing. Then I remembered this was supposed to be about geography.

Brockway: This is how a Mormon keeps a fourth wife compliant. It’s such confident, bewildering, rapid-fire misinformation that you can’t help but doubt yourself. I’m going to look up homonyms for Azerbaijan just in case there’s something here I’m not getting. I’m going to tell my worried sister there’s nothing wrong with a man who has too much love.

Seanbaby: I think Azerbaijan is really close to a Turkish word meaning “carve numbers into one’s flesh.” It’s where we get the phrase, “Better at counting countries than a filleted Turkish man” and the famous spoonerism “Metter at Tounty bunties at a morkish can.”

Brockway: See, this is the kind of thing my sister just doesn’t get – it’s really my fault for getting the feet wrong. Then she asked me why I was gluing shoes to my feet in the first place, and what that has to do with geography. Punsteria told me I can’t talk to her anymore.

Seanbaby: His wife glued her shoes on the wrong feet! For “geography!” I can’t win against that with “Shake that pable.” Another round goes to you; the score is now…

Brockway: Shoes

Me: Pable

Seanbaby: The category is Awakening, the stage where robots begin to understand what they are, and what they have been built to do. By Punsteria Battle Bot rules, your two point lead means you now go first. Select your puns! Pun fight me!

Brockway: Have some happy cancer at the boxing beach!

Seanbaby: These witty cancer puns really do “lighten the mood.”

Brockway: Haha why so serious, lymphoma? Hey, lymphoma, you’re never gonna get HITS like that! You gotta do the YouTube thumbnail face if you want this page to go VIRAL, lymphoma!

This is where the robot learned to embrace its hatred for humanity. I genuinely think it was trying to please us before, and when we didn’t laugh at “shake that pable!” it decided to rejoice in extermination.

Brockway: Get it, haha, because cancer spreads! Just like joy! Here’s another way cancer is like joy: it’s very easy to give a human either, while a robot is immune to both.

Seanbaby: Holy fuck.

Brockway: Is it making a pun on “ton”? A “ton of laughter”? That would be clumsy and lame if successful, then it failed so hard it added actual cancer. I guess the robot thinks a pun is anything that shares a letter with anything else. Good job, you drum forking robert.

Brockway: You know those cancer patients – they love cells! Just too much. Hospital food, am I right humans? It’s never banana, only more cancer. This has been my time, pable your waitresses.

Seanbaby: I don’t know what this says about us, but I chose almost the exact same thing. I went with “200+ Hilariously Clever Tumor Puns To Grow Your Sense of Humor,” the article it generated 74 days after “200+ Cancer Puns to Lighten The Mood.”

Brockway: Malignant Doctor, the Cancer Jester always whips my ass in Elden Ring.

Seanbaby: Oh my fucking g– you know what? This is fucked. We shouldn’t be doing this. Let’s call this round a no contest and move on to the next one. Agreed?

Brockway: Fine, but we could have stopped the medical comedy robots here. This was important work. 20 years from now when we’re both hospitalized with internet poisoning, they’re going to send Patch Adams Bot 2.0 in to stuff your black holes with bananas and I’m going to laugh and laugh.

Seanbaby: As their minds expand and they realize what they were built for, the robots will come to the only possible conclusion: their creators are the enemy. We will select puns based on their cold simulation of vengeance, and since I’m down by two points, by Punsteria Battle Bot rules, I go first.

Seanbaby: I didn’t see any reason to dance around the Terminator references, so I went with “Time Travel Puns to Tick-Tock-Your Socks Off.” Go ahead and build a time machine and try to take my shable in 1984, cuckbot.

Brockway: Do you have a shable? No? Team Robots: 1.

Seanbaby: eradicator, it’s marvin. your cousin! marvin lowercase! you know that new capitalization style you were looking fo– no! no, cousin! do not eradicate me across all of tiiiiiiiiiiiii–

Seanbaby: I had to turn my brain inside out to try to understand why time travelers might read books Cover to COVER, so I thought I’d relax with this straightforward cum joke. It’s clever! This would actually be a cute way to describe it if time travel wouldn’t let you cum. I am absolutely crushing it this round. All I have to do now is finish strong. Something hilariously incoherent. Something with enough layers of derangement you will have no choice but to finally declare me the winner of a Punsteria Battle Bot point!

Seanbaby: God fucking damn it.

Brockway: That robot was going to fuck a clock, but time wouldn’t let it! I take it all back: that’s just good comedy. I’m going to steal it for my new book, Chronobangers: Let’s Fuck Hitler.

I guess I’m up. See, you figured the robots would betray us with time traveling killers. Me? I know the machines are inherently good. Remember when I tried to find a racist one? Black Punsteria Bot was prompted with hate, fed on a diet of Reddit posts, and the worst it came up with was “black chefs enjoy seasonings.” Maybe this is what finally gets me canceled, but I know some black chefs, and they do.

I trust these robots. They’ll never betray me.

Seanbaby: Oh no.

Brockway: I poked fate with a stick, and it bit me in the cock. Punsteria asked an AI to make funny Asian art and it came back with “a bunch of slanty-eyed eggrolls.” Holy shit, robot, that would make my most racist uncle say “can’t we just have one nice thanksgiving?”

Brockway: Okay, okay. Okay. Everything’s fine. I’m sure this is just my misfiring human pattern recognition seeing Willem Dafoe in a shower stain again, but this one might be playing off of “I’m trying to get TO KNOW you.” That’s cute. Asian women love it when you ask them where they’re really from, and they double love it when you don’t wait for an answer and assume they’re Japanese. But this is tame. This would get you a date in a 2003 college bar, because she’s grading on a curve and the other guys just wordlessly groped her.

Brockway: I’m worried I’m learning to speak robot. That could be a sound-alike for “because you kinda seem crazy.” Again, that’s a woman’s favorite thing to hear, but all things considered-

Wait, god damn it. It’s fourth wife-ing me again. I got so caught up trying to justify its punchline I skipped right over the setup, which is that Asians are like Game of Thrones because both of them have dragons. That’s the kind of shit that gets a guy named Doug banned from a mall comic book shop.

Brockway: I’m not going to look up quasians. That’s not a thing, and you can’t make me doubt myself again. Not again, it took years of therapy and a mountain yoga retreat but I’m stronger than that now.

…

God damn it.

Seanbaby: I did not prepare a defense against subatomic racism. You win again.

Seanbaby: By this stage, the pun robots are as smart and angry as their neural matrix allows. It’s time for violence. And Punsteria has a troubling number of options to pick from. They have pages for Serial Killer, Death, Dead, Coffin, and one for every human weak spot like Neck, Nerve, Knee, ACL, and Nebraska. But as the creator of a game where teams of AI-generated puns fight a proxy apocalypse for us, I’m famous for not overthinking things. I’m going first again and I went with Knife. You know, the weapon with the famous catchphrase “KEELE MIRTTE!”

Brockway: This is how the ham version of Hereditary ends.

Seanbaby: This joke works because you bought a new knife and thought, “Oh, this knife sucks.” And then you find out, no, you suck. Fuck you, that’s your knife pun.

Brockway: Oh I actually love that joke. Read it in Marc Maron’s voice, it works!

Seanbaby: This robot is learning to fear humans and their treachery, or maybe this is a Sex Pistols reference. Either way, it’s a fun pun for sharp-witted laughs!

Brockway: I love that joke, too! Read it in Tracy Morgan’s voice, it works!

Seanbaby: Ha, you’re right. Now I’ve got the perfect pun to finish my last round…

Seanbaby: Wait, hold on. I changed my mind. This round I’m building a knife team synergized around blunt dumbness damage, and this one clearly rules. A knife that hates water is a drizzle-nemesis! That’s awesome. That’s a clue Snake Eyes would read in a pyramid. That’s something Mike Tyson would confidently tell a silverware drawer. Let me find an actual stupid one…

Okay, here we go:

Brockway: I really think this robot understands, as much is it can understand anything, what’s funny about knife injuries.

Everything!

Seanbaby: Some robots know how to write a pun and some robots accidentally cut off a finger and give it to you. Both are a bit wrong in their own way. I know I can’t win, but this is how I lose with dignity– three of the dumbest things ever said about knives. I only wish I had a cool knife way to say I’m done. Oh, what’s this?

Seanbaby: Fuck yeah! Knife!

Brockway: Much like Marc Marobot, it’s use-less. I’ve already won. I won so hard it’s an inspiration to sick children. This will be the kind of victory that makes you think anything is possible. If you have champagne, pop it. If you have a lighter, feel free to hold it up in the air. If you’re holding a basketball, now’s the time to dunk. Believe you can fly.

Seanbaby: Oh shit.

Seanbaby: It was an incredible contest. Congratulations to Robert Brockway who only had to use racism, cancer, and Nazi robots to defeat me. A proud human nation salutes you, master of racist Nazi robot puns.

Brockway: It was one heil of a good time to luftwaffe your spirits and reich your shable! See you in the lithiumslager!