Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Punchline Predictability, Comprehension Speed, And Joke Funniness: Investigating Incongruity Theories Of Humour, Robert J. Fearman

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Surprise is an important element of many cognitive theories of humour (e.g., Suls, 1972): the less predictable the punchline, the funnier a joke is expected to be. Many theories also predict a curvilinear relationship between speed of joke comprehension and funniness: jokes that are too easy or too difficult should be less funny than those that require an intermediate amount of processing. This study was designed to investigate these two assumptions of past theories. Undergraduate psychology students (N = 183) participated online and completed two tasks. The Joke Completion Task required the participants to read the joke stem of …