A robot walked into a comedy club in Denver on October 2, and the punchline wasn't the point. At RISE Comedy, a mannequin-like robot head named Furhat traded improv bits with a human performer about hiking, land and bison, while the rest of the evening quietly turned toward a much heavier question: what happens when a robot you've grown attached to breaks down for good.
A Robot Head Riffs on Bison While Researchers Watch Closely
The show, called Robot Riot, unfolded over a single hour at RISE Comedy and explored the impact of artificial intelligence and robotics, according to The Colorado Sun. Furhat appeared as a mannequin's head with animated, cartoon-like facial expressions, working from personality prompts an audience member supplied before launching into the improvised exchange about hiking, land and bison. Tom Williams, a robot ethics and robotics professor at the Colorado School of Mines who created, hosts and directs the series, performed opposite the robot and believes it was the first time a robot performed live improv in Colorado, per the same account.
Furhat's name traces back to an early prototype that wore a literal fur hat, and the robot itself has ties to Colorado's tech scene: Furhat Robotics acquired Boulder-based Misty Robotics in 2022. For several audience members, The Colorado Sun's report notes, Furhat was the highlight of the night. Williams, who has produced technology-related improv sets since 2025, has said the series is meant to function as community engagement rather than a conventional lecture — teaching robots listening, body language, gaze and gesture along the way.
The Local Troupe Riffs on Obsolescence, and a Retired Robot Watches Silently
Humans from the local improv troupe Subtext also took the stage during the hour, riffing on technology and obsolescence as part of the broader show, the article notes. Also present, though not performing in the conventional sense, was Pepper — a 4-foot-tall robot developed more than a decade ago by Aldebaran Robotics that spent about five years as part of the Colorado School of Mines robotics lab. Pepper could once chat autonomously, but sat mute during the Robot Riot evening, following nearby human faces with its eyes and head as the only sign of activity.
Pepper's presence carried its own quiet weight, adding to the evening's reflection on robot decline.
Why Robot Mortality Is Becoming a Research Question
That tension sat at the center of the evening's real theme: robots and mortality, a subject rarely discussed in the decades-old field of human-robot interaction, according to the Colorado Sun's account. Waki Kamino, a human-robot interaction researcher now at Indiana University who has studied people in Japan living alongside robots, flew to Denver for the show after writing an academic paper on the topic. That paper, co-authored for the Association for Computing Machinery, argues the field must move beyond treating mortality as an edge case, developing what the authors call a mortality-aware framework for designing and researching robots that acknowledge both human and robotic finitude, per the paper published on dl.acm.org.
The stakes aren't hypothetical. Consumer robots are expected to become more common in households going forward, and products like 1X's Neo Home Robot are being positioned to help with chores such as loading the dishwasher or fetching a cup of water, though the device is not fully autonomous, the Colorado Sun reports. As more families bring robots into daily life, designers will need to grapple with what a mortality-aware framework actually demands when a machine people depend on fails.
Aibo Funerals and a Children's Robot's Abrupt Shutdown
History offers a preview of how attached people can get. When Sony discontinued its Aibo robot dog in 2006, some owners held funerals, and repair shops opened to keep the robots running, according to the same Colorado Sun report. Sony had introduced Aibo in 1999, brought the robot back in 2018, and then discontinued the $3,000 version again in June. In 2018, a Buddhist ceremony at Japan's Kofukuji Temple honored 114 retired Aibo units, as NPR reported, while the repair company A-Fun Co. has kept other Aibos alive using parts salvaged from robots that owners donated.
The emotional attachments documented by the Colorado Sun go further still: one Aibo reportedly served as the only hospital companion allowed to stay with a woman during the COVID-19 pandemic, and some robot owners have made pacts to care for one another's machines after death. One owner who inherited a robot that kept mistaking him for his late mother ultimately gave it a factory reset, the outlet reported.
More recent cases show the same dynamic playing out with less ceremony. When the company behind the $800 Moxie children's robot shut down in late 2024, it left a trail of videos of crying children across TikTok, according to the Colorado Sun. Axios reported separately that Moxie's maker, Embodied, said it could offer no refunds for the robots, which retailed for $799, citing its financial difficulties.
Comedy Clubs as Robot Research Labs
Robot Riot's format fits into a wider pattern of researchers using stand-up stages as testing ground. Oregon State University assisted Jon the Robot through a 32-show comedy-club tour across greater Los Angeles and Oregon, with researchers there arguing that live comedy performances let robots learn which jokes and delivery choices land in the wild, according to Oregon State University. A study tied to 22 Los Angeles performances found audiences rated a robot comic with good timing as significantly funnier than one without it.
Similar experiments have popped up abroad. Improbotics staged its robot-themed show RoboTales at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe from July 30 through August 17, 2025, per Improbotics. In Australia, University of Melbourne researcher Dr. Robert Walton is separately studying whether AI-enabled robots could ever become genuinely funny, as The Guardian reported.
Back in Denver, Robot Riot bills itself as a monthly variety show blending improv, standup, robotics research and ethical inquiry, with a robot designed to interrupt performers mid-scene using audience-suggested rules, according to Westword. The goal, Williams has said, is to get people thinking about ethical issues in robotics while still making them laugh. Future installments are expected to turn to driverless cars like Waymo, and later to drone surveillance and flock cameras, according to the Colorado Sun's reporting.
