Humor and arousal

A neurally inspired model of humor is presented. It is shown that the structure of a typical joke leads to an unstable arousal boost resulting from a brief and simultaneous maintenance of two incongruous topics. This boost occurs in a joke or cartoon which involves the resolution of an incongruity, but also in cases where the direct evidences of the sense is sufficient to support a concept that is contrary to expectation. Thus, unlike the incongruity-resolution theory, which is the standard cognitive model of humor, the neural theory can account for humor produced in the absence of an explicit resolution step. The model also predicts that the degree of humor declines as response time increases, consistent with anecdotal and experimental evidence. In addition, the arousal boost generated by the model suggests a solution to what is probably the most perplexing question associated with humor, viz., why it results in such a large pleasurable response