A 30-Year-Old Study Reveals the Most Puzzling Thing About Jokes

Comedy Resources #6

Many folks have never stopped to think about what makes a joke work? That includes a lot of people I’ve seen performing at open mics. It’s clear they have no clue about the technical side of joke writing and comedy. But there’s definitely a reason jokes are powerful. And even though most of us hear them, laugh, and move on, there are some good reasons for us to pause and try to deconstruct the intricate mental gymnastics our brains perform in that split second between a setup and a laugh. At least I think there is, which is why I spend so much time on this site doing just that.

I recently encountered a fascinating academic paper written back in 1994 titled “Altered Joke Endings and a Joke Structure Schema.” Okay, if you fell asleep while reading that title, I get it. But, time to wake back up. There’s actually some good stuff here. The co-authors of this essay, Lambert Deckers and Pam Avery, engage in a simple experiment that, quite elegantly, details and pulls apart the anatomy of a joke. And, as a bonus, they also talk about the strange appeal of anti-jokes and why a perfectly logical statement can, in the right context, be more baffling than a surreal punchline. (If you want more on that, read the article.) Anyway…

What Deckers and Avery discovered was a hidden mental blueprint our brains use to process humor. How cool is that?! This blueprint explains why some jokes land while others bomb. So, in this short post, I wanna share a few of the most insightful things I learned from this scientific dive into laughter.

First: Humor is not a single event but a two-part cognitive process. (Read that again, if you have to.) According to their theory, a joke’s first task is to create a sense of incongruity. That’s the twist or surprise, the part of the punchline that seems to come out of nowhere and doesn’t fit with “Story 1,” that is, the story you’ve been told so far. I’ve talked about that quite frequently on this site before. And for those of us who have taken the time to read anything serious about joke writing, this should be basic. That said, a surprising ending isn’t enough to make something funny.

Second: Resolution. After the joke throws a listener’s brain off balance with the unexpected twist, it also has to provide a new, clever way to make sense of everything. A “Story 2,” as I’ve talked about it many times here. As Deckers and Avery put it, “humor may depend on resolving this incongruity between the stem and punch line.” Said another way, it’s this satisfying click of a new understanding falling into place that triggers our amusement and brings resolution. Ah ha! It all makes sense now.

If either one of these elements is missing, a joke will fail. A story with a predictable ending has no incongruity, so it won’t be funny. A story with a bizarre ending that makes no sense has incongruity, but without resolution, it’s just confusing, and it’s not funny either. But does this theory hold water? That’s where their experiment came in. They took several jokes and created three different endings for each one: a) the original punch, b) a perfectly logical and sensible conclusion for a punch, and c) a completely nonsensical ending for a punch.

They tested the setup + its various endings on two groups of participants. One group was told they were reading “jokes,” while the other group was told they were reading “brief paragraphs.” This small instruction, which basically primed them, was the key to the whole experiment and produced a pretty interesting result. When people were told they were reading a joke, they rated the perfectly sensible, logical ending as more puzzling than the actual punchline. To them, a straightforward conclusion was more confusing than a witty twist. Deckers and Avery said it this way: “The major finding was that a logical conclusion was rated more puzzling when it ended a joke than when it ended a paragraph.”

BUT…the opposite wasn’t true. The researchers expected that a punchline ending a “paragraph” would be highly puzzling, but it was not. This led them to conclude that our mental model for a paragraph is not as rigid as our model for a joke. Why? Because our brains have a pre-existing blueprint for how jokes are supposed to work! They called this a “joke structure schema.” (Hence the title.) So, when someone says, “I got a joke for ya,” or a context implies humor, our brain activates this specific mental model/schema.

This schema primes us to expect a certain structure: a setup followed by an incongruous punch that we will then have to resolve. A logical ending simply violates this blueprint. It is not the piece we were expecting to find, so even though it makes sense, it causes confusion. Our brain gets geared up to solve a puzzle, so when it’s handed a simple statement that just makes sense, it gets confused.

What’s really cool about this is that it shows just how powerful our internal schemas are in shaping our perceptions. The expectation of a punch, created by simply labeling something a “joke,” completely changes how peoples’ brains process whatever information their given. Context is everything. Context is king.

So, the genius of a great joke lies in violating the listener’s “joke blueprint” with a twist that feels both impossible and, a second later, perfectly sensible. That takes skill! Our brains, evidently, love the kind of cognitive whiplash that takes hearers on a journey from incongruity to resolution. This is also precisely why original jokes with proper punches are rated the most funny by a huge margin.

This essay by Dekers and Avery is, in my opinion, an insightful resource that, as a student of comedy, leaves me with a greater appreciation for the craft of joke writing. I’m reminded, once again, that humor isn’t about being silly or shocking or random; it is a precise cognitive dance. It’s art and science. It relies on building a specific expectation in the listener’s mind and then violating that expectation in a way that is both surprising and, ultimately, makes a different kind of sense. It is, to borrow a phrase from Jared Volle, creating something “playfully inappropriate.”

JOKE WRITING COURSE: By the way, if you have any interest at all in learning about your persona, how to write some jokes, or doing stand-up comedy, check out my online joke writing course, “The Joke Writer’s Lab,” HERE.