This article studies the joking relationships among the Scandinavian countries, Norway, Sweden and Denmark. Based on joke collections from books? the Internet and other sources, we find that Danes tell jokes about the Norwegians and Swedes, while Norwegians and Swedes tell jokes about each other, but not about the Danes. In general, the Danes tell jokes in which the butt, or object, of the joke...

Four conservatism questionnaires (C-Scale; Wilson and Patterson, 1970; POI; Eysenck, 1976; MK; Cloetta, 1983; 16PF-Q1; Schneewind, Schröder and Cattell, 1983) were compared with regard to their ability to predict responses to humour based on the incongruity-resolution structure. We further investigated, whether a prediction of humour responses could be improved by assessing variables like tough...

Despite its pervasiveness in popular culture, there remains much to be learned about the psychological and physiological processes that underlie our experience of humor. In the present study, we examined the temporal profile of verbal humor elicitation using psychophysiological measures of heart rate (HR) and facial electromyography (EMG). Consistent with recent prior research on cardiovascular...

Sir, Compulsive rituals or acts are stereotyped behaviors that are neither enjoyable nor do they result in the completion of inherently useful tasks (World Health Organization, 1992). Herein we report a patient who presented to us with a rare compulsion of cutting jokes, a phenomenon which is unknown in the literature. A 32 year old male, well adjusted premorbidly, having no contributing past a...

In Howe’ s study (2002), humor originates from perceiving the thoughts of the subject in the humor. We assume that humor and theory of mind (ToM), the ability to infer one’s metal states, could have some relationships. However, the relationships are not clearly known. The present research is aimed to explore the issue by using ToM-jokes, non-ToM jokes, and their unfunny version. The unfunny ver...

We evaluate the influence robots can have on the perceived funniness of jokes. We let people grade how funny simple word play jokes are, and vary the presentation method. The jokes are presented as text only or said by a small robot. The same joke is rated significantly higher when presented by the robot. We also let one robot tell a joke and have one more robot either laugh, boo, or do nothing...

What makes us laugh? One crucial component of many jokes is the disambiguation of words with multiple meanings. In this functional MRI study of normal participants, the neural mechanisms that underlie our experience of getting a joke that depends on the resolution of semantically ambiguous words were explored. Jokes that contained ambiguous words were compared with sentences that contained ambi...

It was attempted to locate dimensions of sense of humour in the attitude space. While previous results suggest that appreciation of jokes based on the incongruity-resolution structure is mainly a function of conservatism, the present paper examined the role of toughmindedness, as the second dimension in the attitude space. Subjects were 115 male and female students. Four conservatism questionna...

We describe the space structuring model, a model of language comprehension inspired by ideas in cognitive linguistics, focusing on its capacity to explain the sorts of inferences needed to understand one-line jokes. One process posited in the model is frame-shifting, semantic and pragmatic reanalysis in which elements of the existing message-level representation are mapped into a new frame retr...