Volume 24, Issue 2

This paper is a contribution to the study of the resolution of incongruities in humor. We reject some criticisms of logical mechanisms and analyze three different types of incongruities in humorous texts: completely backgrounded, backgrounded, and foregrounded. Only the latter are addressed by logical mechanisms. We identify a mechanism of “incongruity shifting” which may be a candidate for “deep” logical mechanism (along the lines of “parallelism” in Attardo et al. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 15: 1–44, 2002). We finally discuss the similarities between Oring's (Engaging humor, University of Illinois Press, 2003) “appropriate incongruity” theory and our approach, which lead us to the conclusion that all resolution of incongruity in jokes is partial.

Humorous stimuli, like jokes and cartoons, are assumed to contain a central incongruity in a specific constellation of opposition and overlap that is essential to their humorousness. Many stimuli also contain additional incongruities that the audience usually overlooks, but that may be needed to create the setup for the main incongruity, e.g., animals that talk, space aliens, an Italian, an American, and a Russian sharing a language. Two of the studies described in the present paper investigated the effect of such backgrounded incongruities by removing them from a set of jokes and cartoons and testing how this affects humor processing and appreciation. A third study investigated whether the elimination of a backgrounded incongruity influences the position of a humorous stimulus on the incongruity-resolution and nonsense humor continuum. Methods included computer-based stimulus rating and self-explanations by the participants. The results suggested that backgrounded incongruities influence humor appreciation because their elimination leads to lower funniness and higher aversion. Furthermore, the backgrounded incongruities contribute strongly to the perceived absurdity of a joke. When they are removed, the jokes are perceived less to be nonsense humor but more as incongruity-resolution humor.

Despite research demonstrating a certain degree of incompatibility between humor and religion, church marquees in the United States frequently use humor, and especially puns, as a way of advertising religious messages. Is the wordplay found in this context different from wordplay in general? Our comparison of the puns found on church billboards versus those found in a general corpus of puns reveals significant differences in structure and content, suggesting that these puns represent a specific type of humor. The discussion outlines possible reasons for these differences, with a focus on social context.

For more than a quarter of a century, the Semantic Script Theory of Humor (SSTH) and its successor, the General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH), have been employed to characterize the factors that define a joke, to describe the components of jokes and their interrelationships, and to provide a model for the analysis of joke texts. But these theories have never been adequately scrutinized. When approached from the perspective of appropriate incongruity some serious questions can be raised about these theories and their usefulness in joke analysis.

The notion of timing in humor is often mentioned as a very significant issue, and yet very little has been written about it. The paper reviews the scant literature on the subject and narrows down the definition of timing as comprising pauses and speech rate. The discussions of timing in the literature see it either as a speeding up or slowing down of speech rate. Using data collected from twenty joke performances, we show that speakers do not significantly raise or lower their speech rate at and around the punch line. The other common assumption is that punch lines are preceded by pauses. Our data show no evidence supporting this claim nor do they show differences concerning these parameters in jokes that involved punch lines in reported speech and those that did not. Similarly, we found no differences between prepared and spontaneous jokes. Therefore, our data lead us to conclude that the theory of timing in joke performance is in serious need of further research.