It's a great test. Creating a joke that is both funny and novel requires many steps.

Creating a joke is a great demonstration of a multistage reasoning/deduction process

Watching them attempt to reason their way to a joke is really amusing.

I asked deepseek-14b for a joke in the style of Norm Mcdonald, and it delivered an overexplained deadpan absurd joke that I thought was pretty similar to Norms style. Then I tried again with different styles and realized that all jokes it tries to make are in that same style as if it tries to follow a manual on how to construct a joke without actually being funny. Which is pretty funny

Would that be funny? Failing a job interview because, when ask to make a joke about a pelican and a walrus who run a tea room together, you couldn't come up with a quip, therefore showing your inability to reason.

Let's not even talk about the "r" you forgot when asked to write "cranberry"...