Previous investigations of satire posit that satire comprehension is influenced by prior knowledge, satirical strategies, and other demographic features, such as age. However, these claims have not yet been tested using online processing techniques. In this study we investigate satire processing using newspaper headlines from the satirical…

According to the cognitive approach to humor, the comprehension of humorous texts implies recognizing an incongruity and resolving it. This article studies whether the cognitive process involved in the recognition of incongruity is affected by the conditions that make contrariety evident or only analytically recognizable in the perceptual domain.…

Much of what we think we know about the performance of humor relies on our intuitions about prosody (e.g., "it's all about timing"); however, this has never been empirically tested. Thus, the central question addressed in this article is whether speakers mark punch lines in jokes prosodically and, if so, how. To answer this question,…

Two experiments were conducted to assess the effects of various constraints on the processing of jokes. Participants read humorous jokes and nonhumorous alternatives of the jokes, which were presented in 3 conditions that manipulated discourse context (comedy, political, and control). In Experiment 1, participants rated the funniness of texts and…