"Mein Fuhrer, I can walk!" is one of my favorite movie quotes.

There's an even deeper and darker universal theme: the self-destructive nature of our mistaken self confidence., which is (paradoxically) as appropriate for comedy as for tragedy.

Bergson theorized that we laugh when we see the mechanistic impulse encrusted on the human instinct (my poor paraphrase). Kubrick's protagonists (both in the tragedies, his anti-war films including the ironic history of Barry Lyndon, and the dark comedy that is Strangelove) act like robots, refusing to acknowledge their own frailty. I don't know how Kubrick intended his version of AI to turn out, but I doubt it would have been redemptive as Spielberg's final take was.