How air conditioners take hot and humid air, and make it drier and cold.
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If you want to cool a very hot piece of metal, you can spray it with water, and it will make the water boil and produce steam. Since boiling water takes a lot of energy, it cool hot things very well. You can also control at which temperature you want to cool thing, since if you just spray until it stops boiling, then the piece of metal is at 100C (212F), which is the boiling temperature of water.
In an AC you spray the inside of a small pipe (usually copper) with a special liquid that boils at 4C (38F) or so. You can then have a pipe that is kept at a cool temperature, and just blow air with a fan close to the pipe (which is usually in a serpentine or coil shape to save space, often with thin aluminum sheets perpendicular to the pipe, those are just to reduce the pipe length needed).
The humidity removal is the same phenomenon you see when you have a cold bottle of beer (4C from the fridge) on which the humidity in the air condense and eventually drips on the floor. This water (previously humidity) is removed from the air, making is dryer. Same thing with the cold pipe in you AC (it drips outside the window or in the drain).
The rest of the AC is just fancy gadgets that take the liquid you just boiled and bring it back to a liquid you can spray again.
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