Reinterpretation and viewpoints

It has often been observed that many jokes rely on the audience reinterpreting the initial part of the joke once the punchline is encountered. In order to elaborate on this account, we outline how these reinterpretations may happen in various ways. The examples we consider suggest that the generalisation is best stated not in terms of syntactic or even semantic forms, since the same mechanism seems to occur in jokes presented visually or partly verbally, partly visually. We sketch an analysis using separate but related viewpoints (expressible in terms of mental spaces), concluding that the revised interpretation may occur in any nested viewpoint, and need not be adopted by the audience as a factually correct interpretation.