Cognitive Aspects

How is the mind involved in the humor experience? This is the leading question when the attention of the researcher is focused on the cognitive aspects. From the Latin word cognitio (knowledge), and also related to the verb cogito (to think), cognition is the term that indicates the work of the mind itself.

Since ancient times, philosophers and scholars have proposed observations on this matter. The Greek philosopher Aristotle noted that laughter for the comic is generated by a particular form of surprise and deception. Surprise typically is a brief emotional state in reaction to the unexpected. Deception implies the feeling of being fooled or misled. Both are connected to a “mental” evaluation of an event that proved to be inaccurate or incorrect. That in humor there exists an unusual, and surprising, combination of events, words, and concepts has in various ways been emphasized by many, such as Cicero and Quintilian. Immanuel Kant (1790/1951) stated that “laughter is an affection arising from sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing” (p. 172). Blaise Pascal and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel stressed the role of a deviation from normal.

All this has prepared the ground for contemporary research work. A turning point took place in the early 1970s, with the development of the cognitive sciences. In particular, of notable importance has been the investigation of the concept of incongruity. This word had actually been previously employed by Alexander Bain and Herbert Spencer among others. What is new is the theoretical framework in terms of perceptual cognitive mechanisms and of information processing. In this perspective, a stimulus is defined as incongruous when it differs from the model (or schema, or mental representation) the subject has of how the stimulus should feature.

A two-stage model has been proposed, mainly for jokes, and it has become a point of reference for research and debate. In the first stage, an incongruity is identified, usually given by an ending of the text that does not seem to follow from the premises. In the second stage, the subject engages in a problem-solving activity to find an element, the cognitive rule that makes sense of the incongruity. Also, the role of a previous stage has been stressed: the setup, which prepares the ending (punch line). The setup may be implied and not explicitly stated. In addition, the key role of a final stage has been underlined. This has to do with the fact that the incongruity resolution [Page 136](often indicated as INC RES) does not normally eliminate the incongruity itself. The odd things and the absurdities that are represented in jokes, not to mention the anomalous use of logic and language, are made acceptable by the cognitive rule but not normalized. A residual incongruity (RES INC) is retained in the cognition of the subject. The following demonstrates how this works: