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Incongruous juxtaposition theory

A beer glass made by Camden Town Brewery (London). The physical presence of beer in the glass's lower part, exactly where the inscription is: 'HALF EMPTY', sets a collision between two frames of reference. This incongruity results in a humorous effect at the moment of its realization.

The incongruity theory states that humor is perceived at the moment of realization of incongruity between a concept involved in a certain situation and the real objects thought to be in some relation to the concept.

Since the main point of the theory is not the incongruity per se, but its realization and resolution (i.e., putting the objects in question into the real relation), it is often called the incongruity-resolution theory.

Francis Hutcheson expressed in Thoughts on Laughter (1725) what became a key concept in the evolving theory of the comic: laughter as a response to the perception of incongruity. Arthur Schopenhauer wrote that the perceived incongruity is between a concept and the real object it represents. Hegel shared almost exactly the same view, but saw the concept as an "appearance" and believed that laughter then totally negates that appearance.

The first formulation of the incongruity theory is attributed to the Scottish poet Beattie.

The most famous version of the incongruity theory, however, is that of Kant, who claimed that the comic is "the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing." Henri Bergson attempted to perfect incongruity by reducing it to the "living" and "mechanical".

An incongruity like Bergson's, in things juxtaposed simultaneously, is still in vogue. This is often debated against theories of the shifts in perspectives in humor; hence, the debate in the series Humor Research between John Morreall and Robert Latta. Morreall presented mostly simultaneous juxtapositions, with Latta focusing on a "cognitive shift" created by the sudden solution to some kind of problem.

Humor frequently contains an unexpected, often sudden, shift in perspective, which gets assimilated by the Incongruity Theory. This view has been defended by Latta (1998) and by Brian Boyd (2004). Boyd views the shift as from seriousness to play. Nearly anything can be the object of this perspective twist; it is, however, in the areas of human creativity (science and art being the varieties) that the shift results from "structure mapping" (termed "bisociation" by Koestler) to create novel meanings. Arthur Koestler argues that humor results when two different frames of reference are set up and a collision is engineered between them.

Sentient and Logical Incongruity Theory

Ito and colleagues (2007) proposed an additional model that builds on incongruity-resolution theories, in which they stress the distinction between the two types of incongruities: the sentient incongruity and logical incongruity. The sentient and logical incongruity theory (SLI) conceives humor as involving two components: the strangeness and the salience. On one hand, the strangeness of the sentence seems to play a major role in how humor is comprehended, because it the ambiguous element that drives the joke. The salience, on the other hand, reflects the cues from the speaker that help activate the appropriate elements to construct the meaning of the discourse, for instance by priming some representation, retrieving them from long-term memory, and holding in the working memory (Ritchie, 2018). According to the same model, if a reader fails at finding strangeness in the sentence, then a being in an amused state is unlikely to happen (Nomura & Maruno, 2011). Therefore, the logical incongruity, which relates to logical consistency of the text, is distinct from what the author termed sentient incongruity, described as deviation from “common sense” or absurdity. The SLI model is quite like Rothbart and Pien’s (1977) model, in which they stress the distinction between possible and impossible incongruity. However, according to Forabosco (2008) the incongruity that results from a joke is never fully resolved. Rather, the reader is left with a residual incongruity, and this residual is the main element for nonsensical humor. But, the problem with such models come from their theoretical background, they all assume steps of incongruity and clear resolution, which deems the SLI as inapt to explain jokes without clear resolution.

Dynamic Comprehension-Elaboration Theory

In order to fully explain the nature of humor comprehension, Nomura and Maruno (2011) developed the dynamic comprehension-elaboration theory (DCET). This model is based on SLI to explain the processes of humor elicitation and comprehension. The DCET is a dynamic model that puts emphasis on elaboration, which is conceptualized as the pervasive process of imagining an event happening and/or remembering one’s experience with a similar event(s). In a nutshell, elaboration is process by which one forms expectations, or uses prior belief regarding the likelihood of an event (Nomura & Maruno, 2011). Nomura and Maruno acknowledge the importance of a sentient incongruity but they put forward the idea that a logical consistency is not required. In this perspective, if a reader can recognize the sentient incongruity, then they will be able to appreciate humorous content. In addition, the ability to recognize the strangeness of a given story, is termed a sentient awareness process. According to Nomura and Maruno (2008) the concept of elaboration allows the reader to switch their perspective and re-examine their understanding of the sentence. the process of recognition of the sentient incongruity is also the first step of humor comprehension. It is then quickly followed by the elaboration step. Thus, if the humor content contains any logical incongruity, then the cognitive processes of a given individual would be blocked at resolution phase, thereby blocking the appreciation of humour. In order to make a joke funny, there is a need to allocate more cognitive resources, which allows for more recursive elaboration, by basically going back and forth to the element of discourse to resolve the incongruity. For instance, Nomura and colleagues (2008) have shown that humor is funnier when it is easier to understand, because they’re less cognitively taxing, thus requiring less elaboration.