Both laypersons and scholars assign the sense of humor a prominent role in our lives. In everyday life individuals use expressions like having or lacking a sense of humor to explain why people behave the way they do. This need to distinguish among facets of humorous and humorless personalities can be deduced from the fact that cultures typically have developed a rich vocabulary of humor-related...

The cooperative principle proposes four maxims in communication. When any of the four maxims is violated or flouted, misunderstanding or implicature, and thus humor might be generated. Humor can also be studied pragmatically within the framework of the relevance theory, which proposes that communication is a process of ostension and inference and differentiates the maximal relevance and optimal...

This article reviews a research program on the effects of humor in advertising on positive and negative brand associations and brand choice, and integrates the findings into a single, overarching model. Based on the Associative and Propositional Processes Model of Evaluation (Gawronski & Bodenhausen, 2006, 2007, 2011), we propose that repeated pairings of a novel brand with brand-unrelated humo...

Humor is ubiquitous and often beneficial, but the conditions that elicit it have been debated for millennia. We examine two factors that jointly influence perceptions of humor: the degree to which a stimulus is a violation (tragedy vs. mishap) and one's perceived distance from the stimulus (far vs. close). Five studies show that tragedies (which feature severe violations) are more humorous when...

This paper deals with a contribution of computational analysis of verbal humor to natural language cognition. After a brief introduction to the growing area of computational humor and of its roots in humor theories, it describes and compares the results of a human-subject and computer experiment. The specific interest is to compare how well the computer, equipped with the resources and methodol...

The prevalence of sexist humor in popular culture and its disguise as benign amusement or “just a joke” give it potential to cultivate distress and harassment for women and to facilitate tolerance of sexism and discriminatory behavior among men. Thus, understanding the social consequences of sexist humor is a critical project for research in social psychology. The purpose of our paper is to pro...

Previous research in cognitive semantics has focused on various mechanisms of ‘dynamic’ meaning construction, like metaphor, metonymy, conceptual integration, irony and sarcasm. The present paper aims at broadening the scope of analysis to include the largely underfranchised topic of humor (in the broadest sense) in the cognitive paradigm. In a first section of the paper, it is argued that Crof...