Is the Concept of Incongruity Still a Useful Construct for the Advancement of Humor Research?

Forabosco, Giovannantonio

doi:10.2478/v10016-008-0003-5

Cited by 61 publications

(59 citation statements)

References 38 publications

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“…Machin and Dunbar 2011). In order to cause laughter, the best jokes are thought to build up a set of expectations in a listener and then use a punchline to update their knowledge in an unexpected way (Canestrari and Bianchi 2012;Forabosco 2008;Hurley et al 2011;Ramachandran 1998;Suls 1972). Whenever these expectations involve the mindstates (i.e., any thoughts or intentions) of third parties (i.e., characters other than the joke-teller or their audience), the natural constraints on our ability to handle mindstates should inevitably play an important role in the complexity of jokes.…”

Section: Europe Pmc Funders Groupmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Some evidence to support this comes from the fact that the number of speaking parts in a scene in Shakespeare's plays (Stiller et al 2004) and at least two genres of modern film (Krems and Dunbar 2013) is identical to the number of individuals who can engage in natural conversations (Dezecache and Dunbar 2012;Dunbar et al 1997). In the case of verbal humor, a major component involves manipulating the expectations of the listener, or equivalently manipulating the mindstates of one or more characters in the story, in order to allow the listener to recognize and resolve incongruency (Canestrari and Bianchi 2012;Forabosco 2008;Suls 1972). We may thus expect stringent limits on the number of mindstates (and hence characters) that can be included in a joke without overtaxing the listener.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the case of verbal humor, a major component involves manipulating the expectations of the listener, or equivalently manipulating the mindstates of one or more characters in the story, in order to allow the listener to recognize and resolve incongruency (Canestrari and Bianchi 2012;Forabosco 2008;Suls 1972). We may thus expect stringent limits on the number of mindstates (and hence characters) that can be included in a joke without overtaxing the listener.…”

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confidence: 99%

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The Complexity of Jokes Is Limited by Cognitive Constraints on Mentalizing

Dunbar

Launay

Curry

2015

Hum Nat

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Although laughter is probably of deep evolutionary origin, the telling of jokes, being languagebased, is likely to be of more recent origin within the human lineage. In language-based communication, speaker and listener are engaged in a process of mutually understanding each other's intentions (mindstates), with a conversation minimally requiring three orders of intentionality. Mentalizing is cognitively more demanding than non-mentalizing cognition, and there is a well-attested limit at five orders in the levels of intentionality at which normal adult humans can work. Verbal jokes commonly involve commentary on the mindstates of third parties, and each such mindstate adds an additional level of intentionality and its corresponding cognitive load. We determined the number of mentalizing levels in a sample of jokes told by well-known professional comedians and show that most jokes involve either three or five orders of intentionality on the part of the comedian, depending on whether or not the joke involves other individuals' mindstates. Within this limit there is a positive correlation between increasing levels of intentionality and subjective ratings of how funny the jokes are. The quality of jokes appears to peak when they include five to six levels of intentionality, which suggest that audiences appreciate higher mentalizing complexity whilst working within their natural cognitive constraints. KeywordsMentalizing; Jokes; Intentionality; Cognitive demand Correspondence to: R.I.M. Dunbar. Robin Dunbar is a professor of evolutionary psychology in the Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford. He is director of the Social and Evolutionary Neuroscience Research Group, which explores the evolutionary, ecological and neuropsychological underpinnings of sociality in primates and humans. Jacques Launay is a postdoctoral researcher in the Social and Evolutionary Neuroscience Research Group, University of Oxford. He studies the mechanisms of large-scale social bonding. Oliver Scott Curry is a lecturer in cognitive anthropology at the University of Oxford. He works on moral psychology and crosscultural variation in moral values. Laughter and humor are ubiquitous aspects of human behavior (Gervais and Wilson 2005), and laughter at least has a very ancient origin that may even predate the origins of the hominin lineage (Davila Ross et al. 2009;Dunbar et al. 2012). Despite this, laughter itself has been the focus of only limited research (Provine 1996). Although humor has attracted much more attention, this has primarily been the province of philosophers, psychologists, and language scholars rather than evolutionarily oriented researchers. More recently, however, there has been growing interest in the ultimate functions of laughter and humor. Laughter and humor may play a number of different (not always mutually exclusive) roles in human communication, including expediting courtship, facilitating the flow of an interaction/conversation, synchronizing emotional states, and social bonding (Bachorowsk...

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Section: Europe Pmc Funders Groupmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Complexity of Jokes Is Limited by Cognitive Constraints on Mentalizing

Dunbar

Launay

Curry

2015

Hum Nat

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“…The entire relationship between incongruity and humor is quite complex (Dynel 2012;Forabosco 2008). Many incongruities in both language and life are neither humorous nor ironic (e.g., many non sequitur responses to remarks), and there are funny (and ironic) things which are not incongruous in any meaningful way (e.g., a person behaving in a way that confirms a stereotype they already embody).…”

Section: Incongruity Reconsideredmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Our focus in this article is on how and when irony gives rise to the experience of humor in verbal discourse. A traditional assumption within linguistic pragmatics is that humor often arises when people make an utterance that expresses some incongruity between what is literally said and pragmatically implied (Attardo 2001;Forabosco 2008;Raskin 1985). Listeners recognize this incongruity, which, in some psychologists' view, creates an affective tension that can be resolved or relieved once the speaker's communicative, and perhaps humorous, intentions are eventually understood (Berlyne 1972;Shurcliff 1968).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Where is the humor in verbal irony?

Gibbs

Bryant

Colston

2014

Humor

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Abstract:Irony is often related to humor, both in spoken and written language. One possibility is that humor arises once people reconcile the incongruity between what speakers say and imply when using irony. Humor automatically emerges in these cases given the release of tension following a momentary sense of disparity. Our claim is that this proposal does not capture many of the dynamic complexities in real-world ironic discourse. We describe psychological research on irony understanding showing that ironic meanings are not always understood via a process of drawing conversational implicatures. Studies on people's spontaneous laughter when using irony suggest that the recognition of incongruity between what is said and implied is not necessary for eliciting humor. Laughter occurs at various places in conversation, and not necessarily at the end of speakers' utterances. People also laugh for reasons other than humor, such as to signal affiliation. Overall, finding the humor in irony is not the same as seen in simple jokes, and demands examination of a complex host of contextual factors not always considered in linguistic theories of humor.

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Humor

Heintz¹,

Hofmann²

2022

The Palgrave Encyclopedia of the Possible

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Is the Concept of Incongruity Still a Useful Construct for the Advancement of Humor Research?

Cited by 61 publications

References 38 publications

The Complexity of Jokes Is Limited by Cognitive Constraints on Mentalizing

The Complexity of Jokes Is Limited by Cognitive Constraints on Mentalizing

Where is the humor in verbal irony?

Humor

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