Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The appreciation of humor is a universal phenomenon and a key aspect of cognition. It has been studied in thecontext of jokes, where the incongruity in expected and observed context results in the perception of humor. The present studyexamines how the humor appreciation of single words relates to the humor of the whole joke – is a joke simply a sum of itsparts? Using a novel dataset of single-word humor ratings, collections of jokes from the JESTER database were analyzed. Amultiple regression analysis showed joke length and individual word arousal were the best predictors of joke funniness. Longerjokes with fewer individually arousing words were found funnier. Individual word humor did not contribute to the humor ofthe overall joke. These findings suggest the cognitive aspects of humor are likely driven by broader semantic context, whereasappreciating humor on a per-word basis links to separate factors.