What makes for the best punchline isn’t as straightforward as people thought. The Surprise Hypothesis, which posits that jokes become funnier as the punchline becomes more surprising or unpredictable, has largely failed empirical research. Even weirder, results suggest that less-surprising punchlines are often funnier. While counter-intuitive, it makes sense once you dig a little deeper.
In order to understand how a predictable or less-surprising punchline can be funnier than an unpredictable or more-surprising one, you need to understand a few theories related to the comprehension and appreciation of humor.
Before we dive in, understand that this research only suggests how punchlines tend to work. The researchers were not specifically analyzing how different jokes structures or strategies might influence the outcome. Thus, it makes no claim about how a specific joke might work. It’s reasonable to assume that plenty of individual jokes, and possibly even entire categories of joke types, might be an exception to these rules.
Humor Recognition: Incongruency Theory & Benign-Violation Theory (BVT)
Humor researchers have long known that incongruency is an important factor in a person’s ability to recognize humor, but it fails miserably at predicting which jokes will be the funniest. There are several humor theories related to humor appreciation, but this article will specifically look at the role that surprise and predictability play inside of a joke.
Incongruency Theories are well supported by research. The consensus among humor researchers is that the perception of incongruency is necessary but insufficient for humor. BVT, a contemporary theory of humor that builds off the old model, posits that the incongruency comes from simultaneously interpreting a situation as being OK (benign) and NOT OK (a violation) at the same time. It’s a violation when your friend trips and falls, but it’s only funny if they are OK.
The Relationship Between “Surprise” and “Violation”
The terms “violation” and “surprise” are often used to mean the same thing, but they are distinct. A violation does not require a surprise and a surprise doesn’t (necessarily) require a violation. You shouldn’t be surprised if you get stuck in rush-hour traffic every weekday, but it’s clearly a violation because it’s interpreted as something that’s wrong or shouldn’t be.
Conversely, if your spouse tells you that they made chicken for dinner, you can be surprised without being upset. Even if you expected to have beef, and could thus say that your expectations were broken, it wouldn’t necessarily be a violation because at no point would you be required to interpret the event as being “not OK.” You shifted from one benign/safe idea to another.
While surprise and violation are independent of each other, they are highly correlated. What a person believes is “expected” or “normal” is heavily dependent on prior experience. The more experience you have with something being normal, the more surprising it is when a violation breaks that expectation.
Seeing a black swan would be surprising, but only because it violates all the experience you have with white swans. If 50% of swans were black, you would not have a rule that swans should be white, and without a rule to break, a violation cannot exist. Understanding this correlation is important to understanding how surprise affects humor.
Testing The Surprise Hypothesis
The first study done on how surprise relates to the humor of a joke was by Dr. Kenny. Kenny split participants into two groups, giving each group the same jokes, but different tasks. Group 1 was told to categorize the jokes by how surprising they thought the punchline was (Low, Medium, or High). Group 2 was told to rate the jokes based on which punchlines they thought were funnier. Kenny then combined each group’s answers and found that low-surprise jokes were rated the funniest, followed by medium-surprise and then high-surprise jokes.
Later studies supported Kenny’s conclusion. Pollio & Mers refined the study to make sure that Group 1 was accurately estimating how surprising a joke was. Instead of placing jokes into simple categories, participants watched clips of stand-up comedians. The video stopped directly before the comedian told the punchline and participants were instructed to write their own punchline.
This proved to be a reliable way of testing exactly how predictable a punchline was. The results supported the earlier study, showing that the punchlines that were the easiest to predict by Group 1 were rated as being funnier by Group 2.
A study by Jaaskelainen et al (2016) showed that there is a limit to how predictable a punchline can be. Using brain scans, Jaaskelainen found that the areas of the brain associated with the comprehension and appreciation of humor are most active the first time someone hears a joke. Repeated exposure to a joke leads to a less pleasurable response.
What These Studies Suggest
If more-predictable punchlines are rated as funnier than less-predictable punchlines, why are new jokes funnier than jokes that a person has heard before? At what point, and why, does being able to predict a punchline decrease the pleasure associated with getting the joke? What’s the minimum level of surprise required and how much is too much?
One reason is that how people experience humor is determined by their mindset at that time. Researchers use the term “Humor Mindset” to refer to a non-serious, playful mental state. When a person is in a playful mental state, it becomes easier to interpret events as humorous. This is why stand-up comedians can get “on a roll” and why people who are upset or angry are nearly impossible to make laugh. A person’s current mental state determines how they interpret events and humor requires playful interpretations.
People are more likely to be in a playful mental state the first time they hear a joke than at any other time. Hearing a joke for the second time doesn’t lead to the same level of curiosity and playfulness as the first time. Each repeated exposure to the joke would be interpreted as more serious and mundane. Some comedians have heard the same jokes so many times that they spend more time judging the quality of the delivery than the joke itself.
A second reason is that a large part of the pleasure that people experience from humor comes from the initial experience of combining ideas together. The initial juxtaposition of two ideas leads to unique and interesting implications to discover.
When a person hears a joke, they don’t just respond to the words inside the setup and punchline, they also explore the joke’s implications (i.e., funny mental images). Repeated exposures to a joke would not be able to duplicate the “thrill of discovery” from the first experience, even if it was done in a playful mental state.
While it hasn’t been studied directly, it’s likely that telling a “first-time joke” too slowly would create many of the same problems that repeat jokes suffer from. Imagine watching a blooper video in slow-motion. While a blooper video still contains all the elements that would make you laugh at regular speed, watching it in slow motion would change how you relate to it.
As you watch in slow motion, you would be able to mentally create one or more possible outcomes before the actual blooper occurs. The “thrill of discovery” that takes place in the Humor Mindset would be replaced with wondering whether you guessed correctly. Even if the guess is correct (and thus should lead to the same outcome as the blooper video at normal speed) the initial interpretation from a serious mindset would destroy much of the humor. So even if your guess was entirely accurate, the slowness of the video would turn the eventual punchline into little more than confirmation that you were correct. The loss of the Humor Mindset suggests that punchlines can contain a surprise that is “too slow.”
The Priming Effect
Further supporting this claim is that researchers have observed a priming effect in humor. A priming effect occurs when exposure to one idea influences the activation of related ideas. Think of it as the way that your brain “gets ready” for a task. For example, when you think about the word “grandmother” you’re brain is subconsciously priming ideas that are related to that concept, making it easier to think about grandma-related ideas. If the topic of a conversation switches to your last vacation, your brain will begin priming ideas related to vacations. You would then be better able to recall ideas related to your vacation than to your grandmother.
Importantly, the priming effect also shapes how you interpret ideas while listening to jokes. Knowing that you’re listening to your favorite comedian has a significant influence on both your mental state and your expectations. You are primed to interpret each punchline as being hilarious, which makes you more likely to then experience that expectation.
What Does This Mean For Comedy Writers?
In general, the most humorous punchlines are indeed predictable, they just don’t give the audience enough time to complete their prediction.
This can be easily seen in comedic stories. The audience is able to understand that a problem is about to happen and have enough time to make a general, unconscious prediction about the punchline, but not have enough time to actually ruin the humor with a more-specific prediction. The next time you watch a funny movie, pay attention to how you respond to the setup of a joke. You’ll notice that many punchlines happen to be “just ahead” of you.
Importantly, a prediction doesn’t need to be exact. The audience simply needs to get “close enough” so that they are primed to interpret the punchline correctly and able to quickly generate humorous implications afterward. Within reason, the more predictable a punchline is, the better an audience is at preparing to laugh… but that laugh will only come if the punchline can still be interpreted as a violation from a playful, humorous mindset.
This research also explains a lot about what it means to have “good timing.” Excluding pauses that might be abnormally short or long to change the meaning of a specific punchline, most pauses that occur between the setup and punchline are non-functional. The pause doesn’t change the meaning of the joke. Yet comedians intuitively understand that these small pauses are extremely important to getting the laugh.
Understanding that jokes become funnier when the audience is “almost” able to predict the punchline explains why non-functional pauses before a punchline can have such a powerful effect on how an audience interprets and responds to a joke. A perfect pause allows the audience enough time to prime humorous ideas (which is unconscious), but not long enough to affect the playfulness of the joke or the audience’s Humor Mindset. So, like so much of comedy, there seems to be an ideal balance.
Jared Volle, M.S.
Author of Playfully Inappropriate: The Fun Way to Write Comedy