Whereas semantic, logical, and narrative features of verbal humor are well-researched, phonological and prosodic dimensions of verbal funniness are hardly explored. In a 2 × 2 design we varied rhyme and meter in humorous couplets. Rhyme and meter enhanced funniness ratings and supported faster processing. Rhyming couplets also elicited more intense and more positive affective responses, increased subjective comprehensibility and more accurate memory. The humor effect is attributed to special rhyme and meter features distinctive of humoristic poetry in several languages. Verses that employ these formal features make an artful use of typical poetic vices of amateurish poems written for birthday parties or other occasions. Their metrical patterning sounds “mechanical” rather than genuinely “poetic”; they also disregard rules for “good” rhymes. The processing of such verses is discussed in terms of a metacognitive integration of their poetically deviant features into an overall effect of processing ease. The study highlights the importance of nonsemantic rhetorical features in language processing.

Humor is a uniquely human faculty closely associated with verbal language skills. To be full of humor in conversation is a highly prized trait of social behavior. It also helps pursuing a variety of pragmatic goals (Long & Graesser, 1988). To what extent wit and humor require high-end linguistic skills becomes evident in the difficulty of being witty and humorous in a second language (Bortfeld, 2002). Most psycholinguistic theories agree that the resolution of puzzling incongruities between levels of semantic meaning is pivotal for humor processing (Attardo & Raskin, 1991; Koestler, 1964; Ruch, Attardo, & Raskin, 1993; Suls, 1976; Wyer & Collins, 1992). Beside incongruence theories, there are also other theories of humor that relate it more to superiority, or release of tension (for an overview see Mulder & Nijholt, 2002).

It is well-known that puns exploit random phonological similarities (homonymies) between semantically unrelated words for activating a funny interaction on the level of their meanings (Gernsbacher & Robertson, 1995), and that many jokes play with double meanings, such as the literal and the figurative meaning of an idiomatic expression (Freud, 1960;