The Multidisciplinary Facets of Research on Humour

Humour is one of the most interesting and puzzling aspects of human behaviour, and it has been rightfully argued that it plays an important role in an individual’s development, as well as in interpersonal communication. Research on this topic has received a significant amount of attention from fields as diverse as linguistics, philosophy, psychology and sociology, and recent years have also seen attempts to build computational models for humour generation and recognition. In this paper, we summarize the main theories of humour that emerged from philosophical and modern psychological research, and survey the past and present developments in the fields of theoretical and computational linguistics. We also briefly overview related research work in the fields of psychology, sociology and neuroscience. The paper concludes with an illustration of the multidisciplinary applications of humour. Note that we focus mainly on “verbal humour,” which is the most tangible and perhaps the most widely researched form of humour. Although other forms of humour (e.g., visual or situational) have also received attention from the research community, we concentrate our work and consequently this survey on the linguistic expressions of humour.