Robot Riot Brings Comedy and Science to RISE Comedy

On Friday night at RISE Comedy, a robot will try to control an improv show. It won’t be writing jokes. It won’t be delivering punchlines. But it will interrupt performers mid-scene with audience-suggested rules, forcing human comedians to adapt in real time.

“The robot is making stuff, but it’s not AI-generated comedy,” says Tom Williams, the creator, host and director of Robot Riot: The Robot Comedy Hour. “The robot is being used as a tool for showcasing the human comedians.”

That controlled chaos that blends technology with humor is the premise behind Robot Riot, a new monthly variety show debuting February 6 at RISE Comedy from the new theater company Dramatheurgy. The series combines improv, standup, robotics research and ethical inquiry into a format designed to make audiences laugh first and then think a little afterwards.

“Comedy is a great tool we have for grappling with big questions about technology and ethics,” Williams says. “Robot Riot creates a space where people can laugh, think and engage with the future, together, in the same room.”

Williams is not a typical comedy producer. He is a human-robot interaction researcher and robot ethicist who directs the MIRRORLab at the Colorado School of Mines. His academic work focuses on how robots use language, gaze and gesture to interact socially with humans, and how the design choices behind those interactions shape trust, power and behavior.

“I focus broadly on sort of two areas,” Williams says. “Human-robot interaction, which is about the psychology and design of interactive robots, and robot ethics, which is about the ethical and societal implications. I don’t do motion planning. I don’t do grasping. It’s all social.”

That social focus will be visible before the show even begins. An hour prior to curtain, attendees can wander through a “Robot Zoo,” where Williams’ graduate students will demonstrate research robots and talk with the public about their work. One of those projects, he explains, involves partnering with a Denver shelter to design robots that help survivors of domestic abuse practice disclosing traumatic experiences in a private, nonjudgmental setting before speaking with staff.

“It’s about designing behaviors that help people with really human problems,” Williams says. Inside the theater, those ideas shift into something lighter but no less intentional. The inaugural lineup includes the improv duo Beige on Beige performing alongside a rule-spouting robot, The Subtext Improv Bookclub inventing a science fiction novel on the spot and headliner Dr. Casey Fiesler, a tech ethicist from CU Boulder who also performs standup comedy about the ethical messiness of modern technology.

Some segments are overtly tied to ethics. Others are more subtle. When a robot injects rules into a scene during the debut show, Williams hopes audiences will recognize a parallel. “When we program rules into robots, those rules don’t just constrain robot behavior,” he says. “They also constrain human behavior.”

The show’s roots trace back to a trip Williams took last year to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, where he saw a technology-driven improv troupe called Improbotics. He had long been using improvisation as a teaching and design tool in his classes, asking students to role-play human-robot interactions before ever writing code. Seeing that method translated into performance sparked an idea.

“Seeing that on stage, and seeing what worked, and things like that, I was like, ‘Oh, but what if you change this?’ and it gave me all these ideas for a show,” Williams says. “It sort of inspired me to be like, ‘I think I could actually have a show with this.’ When I saw how it could work in Edinburgh, it pushed me in this direction.”

That show also reflects Williams’ own artistic evolution. After years performing in a cappella groups, he fell into musical improv while living in Bristol, England, during a sabbatical spent writing his book, Degrees of Freedom: On Robotics and Social Justice. The MIT Press title investigates how race, gender and power structures have shaped robotics since their first appearances in science fiction and how those biases persist in modern design and applications such as policing.

Those themes won’t dominate Robot Riot, but they form the philosophical backbone of Dramatheurgy, the new theater company Williams founded to merge improvisation, technology and social commentary. The name, he explains, is a play on “dramaturgy” and “theurgy,” a term for summoning higher truths through ritual. “It’s about tapping into the magic people feel in improv,” Williams says, “to get at larger truths about the worlds we’re building.”

At RISE Comedy, that ambition fits naturally. “Robot Riot is exactly the kind of show we love hosting at RISE,” says Nick Armstrong, co-owner and artistic director of RISE Comedy. “It pushes comedy forward while still being accessible, and it reflects what RISE does best: creative risk, collaboration and community.”

Williams is already planning future installments for the first Friday of each month. April’s show is expected to feature Heather Knight, a pioneer in robot comedy known for her TED Talks and the Robot Film Festival. Other Dramatheurgy projects in development include an improvised Black Mirror-style show built from tech ethics student ideas and an improvised horror piece centered on authoritarianism. But Robot Riot is designed to be the company’s welcoming front door, allowing audiences to encounter robots not as distant, abstract technologies but as tools for play, curiosity and shared experience.

“I want every show to have something that has an actual robot or AI on stage, something that educates people about what’s going on in tech and something that’s just fun,” Williams says. “It’ll be a different lineup for each show, but with rotating elements so that we can use the same types of segments in different ways.”

For Denver audiences, that means the first Friday of every month may soon involve laughing at, and with, the machines shaping the future.

“Robot Riot: The Robot Comedy Hour is really a blend of a couple different strands of what we do in the lab, combined with what I do outside the lab in improv,” Williams says. “Because I have a science background, it should seamlessly combine the ethical aspects of robotics with some silliness, as it is a comedy show after all. The goal is to get people to think about ethical issues related to robotics while also making them laugh.”

Robot Riot: The Robot Comedy Hour debuts Friday, February 6 at RISE Comedy, 1260 22nd Street, and will continue the first Friday of each month. Learn more at risecomedy.com.