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Humor plays a key role in social interaction, and yet the topic has received surprisingly little attention in cognitive and social neuroscience. The few published lesion and functional imaging studies have been based on incongruity resolution theory, which assumes that humor results from a simple two-stage process (i.e., the detection of incongruity followed by its resolution). However, the available evidence is inconclusive. A more comprehensive account of the cognitive and affective abilities that are involved is necessary, and some suggestions are outlined here.
Despite its role in social interaction, the topic of humor has received surprisingly little attention in the field of cognitive neuroscience. Humor potentially involves both expressive abilities involved in the generation of humorous stimuli, and receptive abilities involved in comprehension and appreciation. A clear relationship between these factors is, however, far from being established. The majority of studies investigating the neural basis of humor processing have been based on the most common humor theory, incongruity resolution (Suis, 1972), which proposes that humor comprehension involves a two-stage process. Despite the relatively large database referring to the two stages, the nature of the underlying cognitive and affective subprocesses contributing to humor processing is as yet unclear.
COGNITIVE THEORIES OF HUMOR
Whereas early humor theories focused on affective aspects of humor processing such as tension reduction (Freud, 1928), more recent approaches have emphasized the role of cognitive processes. According to incongruity resolution theory, humor is based on a two-stage process. The first stage, incongruity, involves the detection of an incongruous element (i.e., an object or event) among two or more incompatible elements.
Consider the example, "A 90-year-old man was driving along the Ml motorway. His wife called him on his mobile phone and said anxiously: 'Stephen, be careful! I just heard on the radio that there was a madman driving the wrong way on the Ml !' Stephen replied: ? know, but there isn't just one madman, there are hundreds.'"
The first stage requires the perception that the response ("there are hundreds") is unexpected or incongruous. In the second stage, the incongruent element is linked in a meaningful way to the body of the text, resolving the incongruity. In the example above, the incongruity is resolved by making the assumption that Stephen must be...