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Are jokes funnier when they’re easier to process?
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Are jokes funnier when they’re easier to process?
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Content
Are Jokes Funnier When They’re Easier to Process?
by
Drew Gorenz
A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC DORNSIFE COLLEGE OF LETTERS, ARTS AND SCIENCES
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS
(PSYCHOLOGY)
December 2022
Copyright 2022 Drew Gorenz
Acknowledgements
The author thanks Norbert Schwarz, Daphna Oyserman, and Leor Hackel for their
comments on this work, and the USC SEEP Lab for advice on study design and analysis.
Correspondence should be addressed to Drew Goremz, University of Southern California,
Department of Psychology, 3551 Trousdale Pkwy, Los Angeles, CA. 90089. Email:
gorenz@usc.edu
ii
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………...………...ii
List of Tables……………………………………………………………………………………..iv
List of Figures……………………………………………………………………………………..v
Abstract.…………………………………………………………………………………………..vi
Chapter One: Are Jokes Funnier When They’re Easier to Process?…………………….………..1
Present Research………………………………………………………………..………..10
Chapter Two: Method………………………...………………………………………………….12
Participants……………………………………………………………………………….12
Design………………………………………………………...………………………….13
Experiment 1: The Influence of Audio Fluency on Humor…………………,…..13
Experiment 2: The Influence of Rhyme and Alliteration on Humor………….…13
Materials and Procedure…………..……….…………………………………………… 14
Chapter Three: Results and Discussion……………….…………………………………………17
Experiment 1: The Influence of Audio Fluency on Humor……………………………...17
Experiment 2: The Influence of Rhyme and Alliteration on Humor…………………….26
Chapter Four: General Discussion……………..……………….………………………………..28
References………………………………………………………………………………………..34
Appendices……………………………………………………………………………………….40
Appendix A: Experiment 2 Stimuli…………………………………………..………….40
Appendix B: Experiment 1 Questions………………………………………….………..42
iii
List of Tables
Table 1: Preferences for comedian by comedian order……….………………………………...18
Table 2: Preferences for high vs. low fluency comedian by fluency counterbalances...…...…...18
Table 3: The most cited reasoning for peoples’ predictions after Experiment 1………...……...23
iv
List of Figures
Figure 1: Preferences for comedian by comedian order……………………………………......20
Figure 2: Participants’ Interest in Seeing the Comedian Live and in Sharing their
Performance by Fluency………………………………………..………………….……21
Figure 3: Participants’ Audio Fluency Predictions in the Pretesting Survey..……………….…22
Figure 4: Lay Intuitions About Audio Fluency Before and After Experiment 1…………….…24
Figure 5: Preferences for the Rhyming vs. Non-Rhyming Punchline…………………………..26
Figure 6: Preferences for the Alliterating vs. Non-Alliterating Punchline……………………...27
v
Abstract
Are jokes funnier when they are easier to process? We manipulated fluency in three ways
in order to explore this question. First, we presented identical standup comedy audio clips in high
or low audio fluency and asked people to evaluate the comedians and their jokes (Experiment 1).
We added bustling venue background noise to comedians’ standup comedy clips to create the
low audio fluency version of each. People’s comedian preferences reversed depending on which
comedian they heard in the low audio fluency condition. Despite identical content, people rated
low audio fluency version of each standup comedian and their jokes as less funny. Secondly, we
presented jokes with two punchline options: a punchline using (1) alliteration or (2) rhyme and a
substantively equivalent punchline with no alliteration or rhyme (Experiment 2). A majority of
people judged the rhyming (vs. non-rhyming) punchlines and the alliterating (vs.
non-alliterating) punchlines to be funnier. Throughout, easy processing increased funniness. We
also explored whether people intuit the negative effects of audio fluency on humor. Only a small
percentage of people correctly predicted that a comedy show would seem funnier to them if the
venue were “really quiet,” whereas a majority thought otherwise. Only a small percentage of
people updated their audio fluency predictions after the experiment, suggesting many people
misattributed the negative contextual effects of low audio fluency on their humor evaluations to
the comedians and jokes themselves. Our fluency findings are compatible with simultaneity
theories of humor, including Benign Violation Theory. How fluency may influence humor
judgments, potential boundary conditions for fluency effects, and additional potential
applications are discussed.
vi
Chapter One: Are Jokes Funnier When They’re Easier to Process?
Our society values humor highly. Successful comedians like Chris Rock and Dave
Chappelle sold their 1-hour long standup comedy specials to Netflix at $20 million per special
(Goldberg, 2016; Smith, 2016). People assume a person with a “well above average sense of
humor” is also higher on other socially desirable qualities such as friendliness, pleasantness,
cooperativeness, interestingness, imaginativeness, creativity, cleverness, admirableness,
intelligence, and perception compared to a person described as having a “typical” or “below
average” sense of humor (Cann & Calhoun, 2001). Humor can also increase the ease of
understanding complex topics and facilitate the persuasive appeal and sharing of messages
(Chattoo, 2019; Eisend, 2009). Evidence suggests that a humorous appeal in negotiations can
even lead to larger financial concessions (O’Quin & Aronoff, 1981). Yet, how people make
judgments of what is funny and whether to share a joke are underexplored questions.
Fluency
People can judge the funniness of a joke by considering its content (i.e., words, actions)
or the accompanying subjective experience of processing the joke (i.e., ease or difficulty, arousal,
mood). Typically people utilize both the content of a message and their processing experience as
information to inform their judgments on the message and the messenger. Though many
researchers have looked at the role of content in peoples’ humor judgments of comedy
(Godkewitsch, 1974; Hillson & Martin, 1994), few have investigated the role of peoples’
experienced ease in processing the comedic content on their humor judgments.
The ease of processing a message (i.e., its fluency) plays an important role in influencing
peoples’ preferential evaluations of many things, from art (Reber et al., 1998) to music (Peretz et
1
al., 1998) to consumer products (Chae & Hoegg, 2013) and brands (Lee & Labroo, 2004). People
often develop preferences for a more fluent item via one or a combination of the following two
paths.
Fluent processing feels good. Many studies show that people experience easy processing
as affectively positive (Winkielman et al., 2003); this has been demonstrated through
electromyography (EMG) measuress of increased zygomaticus (smiling muscle) activity
(Harmon-Jones & Allen, 2001; Winkielman & Cacioppo, 2001; Winkielman et al., 2006) and
through self-reports of momentary feelings (Monahan et al., 2000), although, people don’t
always show a conscious awareness of any resulting affective changes (Janiszewski, 1993;
Zajonc, 1980). Conversely, EMG measures show increased corrugator (frowning muscle) activity
for participants when they process disfluent (difficult-to-process) material (Topolinski et al.,
2009). This positive affect via fluency (vs. negative affect via disfluency) often increases liking
for whatever item one is evaluating.
Fluency also conveys metacognitive information that whatever one is processing is easy,
which can lead to preferential judgments of the item. For example, one might use the
metacognitive information that their experience listening to a series of jokes by a comedian felt
fluent as evidence that the jokes were funny. However, what one concludes from their own felt
ease depends on which lay theory they draw on. One’s experience comprehending a joke can be
difficult because the joke’s reasoning is unintelligible or because the listener is unmotivated and
distracted, or simply because there is a lot of background noise. People can end up with different
evaluations of a joke depending on what they attribute their experienced ease or difficulty to.
2
People can also end up with different evaluations of the joke depending on whether they
think that source of ease or difficulty provides valid information to inform their judgments of the
joke. For example, one may regard certain fluency variables as “integral” to a joke (e.g., the
content of a joke itself) and certain variables as “incidental” to a joke (e.g., the background noise
levels while one listens to a joke) to use Bodenhausen’s (1993) terminology. This distinction
marks whether the feelings of ease (or difficulty) provide valid information to inform one’s
judgment of the joke or not. When people discover that their experienced ease of processing a
message has been “incidentally” manipulated, they tend to discount the informational value of
that experience - in line with the account of “incidental” variables being invalid sources of
information (Novemsky et al., 2007; Schwarz et al., 2021). For example, consider a situation
where people listen to jokes with bustling social background noise (a low audio fluency
“incidental” manipulation) and judge how funny the jokes are. If people learn that their
experience in processing the jokes has been made difficult due to “incidental” situational
influences, they may do one or a combination of the following. People may (1) discount their
feelings of difficulty and (2) base their humor judgments of the jokes more heavily on the content
of the jokes. They may also (3) attempt to judge the humor of the jokes based on how funny they
imagine they would be in a more ideal context than the one they heard them in. However,
because people are less sensitive to the source of their feelings than they are to the content of the
feelings, people often interpret feelings that are “incidental” to the object of judgment the same
way they interpret feelings that are “integral” to the object of their judgment (Schwarz, 2012;
Schwarz & Clore, 2007).
3
Researchers can measure one’s ease of processing through objective means (e.g., by
recording the speed with which people process it) or subjective means (e.g., through self-reports
of the felt ease of processing it). Distinct from objective measures, peoples’ subjective feelings of
fluency take into account people’s prior expectations of ease or difficulty and predict greater
differences in liking than objective measures (Forster et al., 2013; Schwarz et al., 2021). Further,
one-item subjective self-reports asking about the felt ease of the task at hand tend to reliably
measure fluency as well as multi-item measures (Graf et al., 2018).
Fluency’s Role in Humor Appreciation
Before we consider how fluent processing may affect peoples’ humor appreciation in
greater depth, we first discuss what components drive the experience of humor. Many theories of
humor necessitate some form of simultaneity (sometimes labeled as incongruity, bisociation,
script opposite, cognitive shift, benign violation), defined as holding contrasting interpretations
that are both possible and mutually incompatible at the same time (Attardo & Raskin, 1991;
Koestler, 1964; Veatch, 1998; Warren et al., 2021; Wyer & Collins, 1992). Empirical studies
support this and have shown that people rate word pairings of concepts with less compatible
meanings (e.g., “hot poet”) as funnier than word pairings of concepts with more compatible
meanings (e.g., “happy child”) (Godkewitsch, 1974; Hillson & Martin, 1994). Neuroscientific
evidence supports this idea; humor appreciation involves activity in a brain region associated
with processing conflicting signals, the temporo-occipital junction (Vrticka et al., 2013). Indeed,
researchers observed higher levels of activity in this brain region for adults when they viewed
images with humorous vs. non-humorous captions (Amir et al., 2013). Amir and colleagues
suggest that the unexpected linking of concepts in a joke punchline elicits a pleasurable response
4
in humor based on the differences in neural activity observed in people when they look at
humorous vs. non-humorous stimuli.
There are multiple ways in which fluent processing of a joke’s punchline could increase
its judged humor. First, one may draw on their own affective experience processing a joke when
evaluating its humor. One’s fluent (vs. disfluent) processing of a joke may feel more affectively
pleasant, leading to greater judgments of the joke's humor. Second, one may draw on
metacognitive information when judging the humor of a joke. If one believes their experience
listening to a comedian’s jokes should be somewhat fluent, one may judge a more fluent series of
jokes as funny, independent of the affective influences of fluency on peoples’ judgments. Third,
since fluent processing generally increases the perceived truth of a statement (Bacon, 1979;
Hasher et al., 1977; McGlone & Tofighbakhsh, 2000; Newman & Schwarz, 2018), one may
judge the resolution of a joke’s easily processed punchline to be more compelling, also
increasing one’s judged humor of the joke. Any one or combination of these lines of reasoning
predicts that more fluent processing will increase one’s evaluation of a joke’s humor. However,
before we attempt to separate the relative contributions of these pathways, we investigate if the
assumed fluency-humor relationship is robust across different manipulations. The present studies
do so.
Some past work provides initial evidence that fluency can contribute to humor
appreciation. Topolinski (2014) demonstrated that jokes are rated as funnier when their
punchlines are easier to process through testing two “incidental” manipulations of fluency.
Participants were presented (1) jokes in easy-to-read (vs. difficult to read) fonts and (2) jokes in
which one keyword in the punchline to the jokes was presented earlier to participants 0, 1, or 15
5
minutes before they read the jokes (vs. the no earlier exposure condition). Participants rated the
more fluent jokes as funnier with the exception of jokes when the punchline was exposed
immediately (i.e., 0 minutes before, as opposed to a 1 or 15-minute delay) before participants
read the jokes. In this scenario, the positive effects of fluency (through prior exposure) reversed.
Participants were better at predicting the punchline (via free response) to the jokes when they
were exposed to part of the punchline immediately before seeing the joke (compared to the
delayed prior exposure and the no prior exposure conditions), which suggests this condition
potentially spoiled the jokes for people by eliminating the experienced incongruity in the jokes.
However, another possible explanation is that the “incidental” nature of the fluency manipulation
is made more obvious in the immediate exposure condition, and participants are discounting the
impact of their experience on their humor judgments. Further exploration of different fluency
manipulations on humor appreciation would help illuminate how robust this relationship is, what
boundary conditions exist and whether “integral” fluency manipulations of comedy can also
increase the humor of jokes.
To date, the relationship between processing fluency and humor has not been extensively
explored beyond Topolinski (2014) or demonstrated in a cultural context and language outside of
Topolinski’s German participants. Further demonstration of the robustness of this phenomenon
and integration into current humor theories would benefit the field of humor research. Testing a
greater number of fluency manipulations could also provide practical, empirically demonstrated
techniques for people to employ in their everyday life to communicate more humorously. We
discuss two previously untested fluency applications (aesthetic devices and audio fluency) on
peoples’ judgments of humor in jokes below before we discuss our present studies.
6
Phonological Fluency and Humor
Several aesthetic devices in language facilitate favorable evaluations of messages by
manipulating the ease with which words are recognized and understood. Rhyme and alliteration
are two of these. Rhyme is the repetition of ending phonetic sounds across two or more proximal
words or lines. Alliteration is the repetition of initial phonetic sounds across two or more
proximal words.
Objective measures of fluency show that these aesthetic devices facilitate fluent
processing. Reading a particular sound increases the accessibility of subsequent words sharing
the identical sound (Davis et al., 2016; Perfetti et al., 1988), which applies to rhyme and
alliteration. People are faster at recognizing whether visually presented letter strings are words if
the preceding word rhymes with the string of letters they are judging (Meyer et al., 1975).
Similarly, Davis et al. (2016) showed shorter response latencies when people evaluated
alliterative rather than non-alliterative promotions. Moreover, Davis et al. (2016) showed that
peoples’ more positive evaluations of alliterative (vs. non-alliterative promotions) were mediated
by the subjectively experienced speed with which they were processed. Consistent with these
differences in processing speed, these aesthetic devices produce reliable fluency effects, including
increased favorability of advertising messages (Filkuková & Klempe, 2013) and pricing
promotions (Davis et al., 2016), and truth judgments of aphorisms (McGlone & Tofighbakhsh,
2000).
There is some evidence that one’s phonological fluency can moderate one’s experience of
humor. Researchers looking at the link between schizophrenic subjects’ humor appreciation and
their neurocognitive performance have linked schizophrenic patients’ reduced humor
7
appreciation to their reduced phonological fluency (Bozikas et al., 2007). Menninghaus et al.
(2014) showed that participants evaluated lines of poetry by a famous German poet as funnier
when they utilized rhyme. They presented participants with either the poet’s original rhyming
lines or substantively equivalent non-rhyming substitutes and compared participants’ humor
ratings between these. However, this study was limited in a few ways. The researchers did not
look at the effects of fluency on the humor of “jokes” in any formal definition of the term
(Attardo & Raskin, 1991); instead, they looked at the effects of fluency on humor in poetry.
Poetry differs from other forms of communication in its frequent and expected use of rhyme and
other aesthetic devices. Thus the findings of this study may not generalize to other forms of jokes
outside of written poetry. More importantly, Menninghaus et al. (2014) mention they used
“unfamiliar” two-lined couplets from the famous German poet. However, they did not report
whether they asked participants if they recognized the lines or whether the researchers filtered
out anyone who did. This suggests there could have been increased fluency with the original
rhyming lines compared to the new substantively equivalent non-rhyming lines that had more to
do with participants’ past exposure to the famous poet’s original lines rather than phonological
fluency. This experiment was also limited in its sample size (n = 40). Further exploration of
whether aesthetic devices influence the funniness of comedy outside of poetry would help
address these issues. We discuss one more untested fluency manipulation of humor below.
Audio Fluency & Humor
People consume comedy in many different settings, from watching a live performance at
a concert venue or coffee shop to listening to a recorded performance in their car or home. A
range of background noise can interfere with one’s attention and processing of the jokes in any of
8
these settings, from the distracted chatting of members in a crowd to the mechanical operations
of a barista at one’s coffee shop or the noisy activities of family members inside one’s home. We
wondered how the bustling noise of others might affect peoples’ judgments of humor.
Researchers have demonstrated that audio quality can affect peoples’ judgments of
research (Newman & Schwarz, 2018) and eyewitness testimony (Bild et al., 2021). In particular,
when participants heard presentations of research where the audio quality was manipulated to
sound farther away and more difficult to process (vs. a good audio quality presentation of the
same research), participants rated the talk as worse, the research as less important, and the
speaker as less intelligent and less likable. In a judicial context, participants who heard a poorer
audio quality recording (vs. a good audio quality recording) of an eyewitness testimony rated the
testimony as less credible, less reliable, and less trustworthy and weighted the evidence less in
their final decisions.
Research has not investigated, however, whether audio fluency can affect one’s judgment
of humor. If fluency serves as an input into humor judgment, then context-level variables that
impair one’s processing of a joke (e.g., bustling background noise) should reduce the perceived
funniness of the joke. Research has also not investigated whether people would intuit the
negative effects of audio fluency on humor if they exist.
Faulty Humor Forecasting
People seem to have little insight into how their experienced ease in processing
something affects their judgments of the same stimuli (Schwarz et al., 2021). For example,
people use their feelings of fluent processing to judge whether a statement is true or not, even
when those feelings of fluent processing are the result of variables that are “incidental” (e.g.,
9
poor print font) to the truth of the claim (Song & Schwarz, 2008). The effect of fluent processing
as a result of “incidental” variables on peoples’ judgments often attenuates as soon as people
become aware of the source of said fluency, illustrating peoples’ lack of awareness of what
variables often guide their judgments (Novemsky et al., 2007). Extensive research shows
evidence that while people have some access to their thoughts, they are poor at reporting on the
cognitive processes that took place to bring them there and poor at noticing the influence of
situational and stimulus effects on their thinking (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977).
Little research has examined people’s awareness of what variables guide their humor
judgments. This is unfortunate, as a lack of awareness of what makes things funny can lead to
adverse consequences. Telling a poor joke can lead to great awkwardness for oneself and one’s
audience at best; it can elicit offense from one’s audience at worst. Hence, it is important to
understand the extent of our own abilities in forecasting humor for others so we can know when a
joke will hit or fail. Sometimes a joke can fail for reasons integral to the joke (such as the content
of it), and other times for reasons incidental to the joke (such as the time and place one hears it)
(McGraw et al., 2014). Do people have correct lay theories about how context affects their
evaluations of humor? If not, will they misattribute the contextual influences on their humor
evaluations to the comedian and the jokes themselves? Experiment 1 explores this question in
relation to audio fluency.
Present Research
The present studies test whether people judge jokes as funnier when they are easier to
process. In particular, we explore the influence of three fluency manipulations on humor
appreciation: (1) audio fluency in the form of background noise in audio recordings of standup
10
comedy performances, and (2) rhyme and (3) alliteration in written fill-in-the-blank joke
punchlines. We collected the data for all tests in the same overall data collection. Because we use
different research designs to test distinct concepts, we present the audio fluency findings as
Experiment 1 and the rhyme and alliteration (phonological fluency) findings as Experiment 2.
In addition, we explore whether people intuit that audio fluency would influence their
humor appreciation. For this purpose, we included a question in the University of Southern
California subject pool’s pretesting procedure. We later compare the results of the audio fluency
manipulation on peoples’ humor appreciation in Experiment 1 to those pretesting expectations.
We measure the effects of our fluency manipulations on peoples’ judgments through two
different means: choice and ratings. People often choose which comedy to watch and may rank
their favorite comedians or shows. In everyday life, people are less likely to rate how funny a
comedy is using a rating scale. Hence, we regard “choice” as an ecologically valid measure of
humor and use a “choice” measure across all three fluency manipulations. However, since
“choice” does not reflect how much a joke's fluency may affect its funniness (beyond what is
preferred), we also use ratings to gauge the size of the fluency effect with our audio fluency
manipulation.
We predict that lower audio fluency (through greater bustling social noise) will decrease
participants’ judgments of humor, as their experience of holding simultaneous, incompatible
interpretations is made more difficult. In accordance, we predict sharing intentions for the jokes
and general interest in hearing more jokes from the comedian will also decrease with lower audio
quality. Since comedy is often performed in social environments or created dynamically between
multiple people, people associate it with bustling social environments. Because of this, we also
11
predict that the negative influence of lower audio fluency (through a venue’s bustling social
noise) on participants’ humor appreciation will be counterintuitive for people. We also predict
substantively equivalent punchlines will be judged as funnier (1) when they rhyme vs. when they
do not and (2) when they alliterate vs. when they do not.
Chapter Two: Method
Participants
To test the effect of background sound on audio comedy (Experiment 1) and of rhyme
and alliteration on written comedy (Experiment 2), we recruited N = 273 students from the
University of Southern California (USC) Psychology subject pool (68% female, M
age
= 20.2,
English first language 83%, 13% international students, slightly liberal M = -1.51 on a scale from
-4 = Very Liberal, to 4 = Very Conservative). We used only those participants who did not
recognize the comedian and did not have auditory problems to test auditory humor (Experiment
1). We dropped 59 students (N for analysis = 214) who indicated they were not in a setting to
comfortably hear audio (n = 12), indicated they recognized either comedian (n = 6), or failed or
missed filling out the audio fluency task’s content recognition check (n = 41). We saw no
statistical difference between the number of people who failed the content recognition condition
for the high fluency comedian vs. the low fluency comedian (McNemar’s X
2
(1, N = 255) = 1.88,
p = .170). To test for the effect of rhyme and alliteration (Experiment 2), we retained the full set
of N = 273 since the audio settings, and verbal attention checks were unrelated to Experiment 2’s
written stimuli. Even though the data of both experiments were collected during the same data
collection session, we treat them as two separate experiments because they are based on different
manipulations and follow different research designs.
12
To explore whether people had prior intuitions that audio fluency would influence their
humor appreciation, we included one question in the USC Psychology subject pool’s pretesting
survey (N=920, 65% female, M
age
= 20.1). We later compare the results of the audio fluency
experiment to these pretesting expectations.
Design
Experiment 1: Audio Fluency and Humor
We used a 2 (Fluency: high vs. low) x 2 (Low fluency comedian: comedian A vs.
comedian B) x 2 (Fluency order: high first vs. low first) x 2 (Comedian order: comedian A first
vs. comedian B first) mixed design with fluency as the within-subjects repeated factor, and the
latter three as between-subjects counterbalance factors. We randomly assigned participants to
their counterbalance conditions. After participants heard both recordings, they evaluated the
standup comedians and their jokes.
Experiment 2: Rhyme and Alliteration and Humor
After participants completed the dependent measures for Experiment 1, they participated
in Experiment 2. We used a separate 2 (Fluency: high vs. low) x 2 (Fluency manipulation type:
rhyme vs. alliteration) within-subjects repeated design to test the effects of audio fluency on
humor appreciation through rhyme and alliteration. We asked participants to help us determine
the funnier punchline of two options for each fill-in-the-blank joke. Participants indicated which
punchline was funnier with their dichotomous preference choices for 25 jokes (10 rhyming vs.
non-rhyming, 10 alliterating vs. non-alliterating, and 5 filler punchlines). These jokes are listed in
Appendix A. Participants judged every joke. We randomized the order in which participants saw
each joke and each punchline option across participants.
13
Materials & Procedure
This study was part of a larger survey that included other humor stimuli for pre-testing
before participants completed the rest of the survey. We pretested participants’ humor ratings of
celebrity jokes. We have no theoretical reason to believe those stimuli would have impacted our
experimental findings. After participants rated the humor of these stimuli, they listened to two
standup comedy clips.
We selected approximately one-minute-long standup comedy segments from two
comedians. We added bustling coffee shop noise (found on YouTube) using Garageband software
to the clips to create the low-fluency version of each comedian's performance. The background
noise clip we added consisted of bustling noises one might hear at a busy coffee shop, such as
indistinct chatter, the noise of people moving around, dishes clanging, and beans grinding. We
left the standup comedy clips unedited for the high-fluency version of each comedian. The
original recordings included some baseline audience noise in the form of laughter but were
otherwise relatively clear and easy to process. The audio fluency stimuli are uploaded on OSF
(https://osf.io/td49x/?view_only=64090f55a2094302a020af0603b7990f). We embedded the
comedian performances as audio recordings in the survey. We asked participants to evaluate each
comedian on a few dichotomous measures immediately after listening to both clips: (1) “Which
comedian are you interested in hearing more jokes from?” (2) “Which comedian did you think
was funnier?” (3) “Which comedian would you prefer to see live?” They also evaluated each
comedian and their jokes using a 10-point Likert scale (0 (Not Funny At All) - 9 (Very Funny))
for (1) “How funny was each comedian?” and (2) “How funny were the jokes in each comedian's
standup performance?” They also rated their interest in sharing the performance and seeing it live
14
on a 7-point Likert scale (1 (Not At All) – 7 (Very Much)) for (1) “How interested would you be
in sharing each comedian’s performance with your friends if we gave you a link to their full
performance?” (2) “How interested are you in seeing each comedian live?” Then we asked them,
“Would you like the link to the first/second comedian's full standup comedy performance?” with
the dichotomous options “Yes” / ”No” for each standup comedian. The survey questions are
listed in Appendix B.
After completing the Experiment 1 dependent measures, participants indicated which
punchline was funnier for 25 jokes (10 rhyming vs. non-rhyming, 10 alliterating vs.
non-alliterating, and 5 filler punchlines) (Experiment 2). We created novel fill-in-the-blank jokes
with two punchline options for each joke. For the rhyme items, participants chose between 2
punchlines, one option that rhymed and one substantively equal punchline that did not rhyme
(e.g., “Group of people that really enjoy air circulation: ____ (a) The Fan Clan vs. (b) The Fan
Tribe”). For the alliteration items, participants chose between 2 punchlines, one option that
utilized alliteration and one substantively equal punchline that did not alliterate (e.g., “An article
of clothing you would hate to step into: _____ (a) Poopy Pants vs. (b) Poopy Slacks”).
Because every word has its own unique cultural history, connotations, or semantic
collocations in language, no one substantively equal synonym will be a perfect control item for
its counterpart. Because of this, we chose to test 10 different target vs. control items for each
aesthetic device to account for the potential random noise in our experiment. Exploring 10 items
for each should allow us to find the pattern that increased fluency makes jokes funnier if it exists.
In addition to randomizing the rhyming and alliterating stimuli together, we included 5 filler
items to help obscure the point of the study. The filler items similarly asked participants to
15
choose the funnier of two punchlines but did not utilize a rhyme vs. non-rhyme or alliteration vs.
non-alliteration design.
Then participants completed the Cognitive Reflection Test and their judgments of truth in
the claims that the standup comedians made in their jokes. The questions used to assess the
perceived truth of the jokes’ content suffered from ambiguous wordings and will not be
addressed. These items came after the humor stimuli judgments that are of interest for the
reported studies. Hence, they could not affect our Experiment 1 and 2 results reported here.
Finally, we asked participants (1) to tell us what they thought the study was about and
what they thought the hypothesis of the study was, (2) whether they had heard either standup
comedian’s jokes before today for both comedians, (3) two multiple choice content recognition
questions to ensure they were paying attention to the audio fluency stimuli (4) the same audio
fluency venue question they were asked in pretesting (described below), (5) “Why do you predict
this?”(open-ended) (6) “Do you generally think comedy benefits from hustle and bustle? Or
should the setting be really quiet?” (1 (Should be very quiet) - 7 (Hustle and bustle is good)), and
(7) participants’ comedy-seeking behavior, sex, age, political leaning, native language, and
nationality.
In the separate USC Psychology subject pool pretesting survey, we included one question
for all participants to complete. To test participants’ predictions about the effects of audio fluency
on their humor appreciation, we asked participants, “We're curious what makes for a good
comedy setting. Where would you find a live comedian more funny?” and gave the options to
choose between: “A bustling coffee shop,” “A really quiet coffee shop,” and “Makes no
difference.” We decided on coffee shops as the venue to situate our question in because they are a
16
common venue for open mic’s for comedy and other arts, and they often range greatly in how
bustling they are. We also collected basic demographic information on participants’ gender and
age. Both the main survey and the pretesting survey were presented via Qualtrics.
Chapter Three: Results and Discussion
Experiment 1: Audio Fluency and Humor
Bustling Noise: The Impact of Audio Fluency on Humor Ratings & Preferences
Participants listened to one high fluency recording of a comedian and one low fluency
(bustling noise added) recording of another comedian. A majority of participants chose the fluent
comedian as funnier (M = 66%, 95% CI = [.60, .73] vs. M = 34%, 95% CI = [.27, .40] for the
low audio fluency comedian). This preference for the more fluent comedian held across the
counterbalancing conditions (see Tables 1 and 2). The influence of audio fluency was sufficient to
elicit preference reversals: people preferred the comedian whose performance was easier to
process, whichever comedian that was (Comedian A when fluent: M = 73%, 95% CI = [.64, .81];
Comedian B when fluent: M = 60%, 95% CI = [.50, .69]). In addition, we saw a main effect of
comedian, as Comedian A was chosen as funnier (M = 57%, 95% CI = [.50, .63]) over Comedian
B (M = 43%, 95% CI = [.37, .50]); otherwise, we did not observe any other main effects or
interactions between our stimuli and stimuli order. The preferential differences remain
statistically significant with a post-hoc Bonferroni correction.
17
Table 1. Preferences for comedian by comedian order
Table 2. Preferences for high vs. low fluency comedian by fluency counterbalances
In sum, low audio fluency led to lower humor appreciation. We saw this dynamic not only
reflected in participants’ choices when asked to indicate which comedian they thought was
funnier but also when we looked at their mean ratings of how funny each comedian was. We
conducted the below analyses with a Bonferroni correction to account for the numerous humor
judgment tests. Participants indicated higher humor ratings for each comedian (raw mean scale
difference = 1.03, 95% CI [0.68, 1.38]; d = 0.46) and each comedian’s jokes (raw mean scale
difference = 0.91, 95% CI [0.52 to 1.30]; d = 0.39) when they listened to the high fluency version
vs. the low fluency version (see Figure 1). This effect did not depend on the stimuli used,
according to participants’ between-subjects data. In other words, people who heard the high
18
fluency version of Comedian A rated the comedian as funnier than those who heard the low
fluency version of Comedian A (raw mean scale difference for Comedian A = 1.16, 95% CI
[0.55, 1.78]). We saw the same effect for Comedian B (raw mean scale difference for Comedian
B = 0.92, 95% CI = [0.34, 1.50]). This pattern also held true for the humor ratings for each
comedian’s jokes (raw mean scale difference for Comedian A = 0.99, 95% CI = [0.36, 1.61]; raw
mean scale difference for Comedian B = 0.85, 95% CI = [0.23, 1.48]). We did not observe an
interaction between comedian and fluency. Although we saw evidence suggesting a main effect
of which comedian participants listened to on their humor ratings (raw mean scale difference =
0.45, 95% CI [0.08 to 0.83]), this effect did not hold up when accounting for a Bonferroni
correction on our seven analyses of humor ratings. The effect of fluency on humor ratings did not
depend on the order of comedians or the order in which they heard a low fluency recording first.
Looking at the participants who had also completed the pretesting prediction question (188 of
our 214 Experiment 1 participants), we saw that regardless of participants’ prior fluency
predictions on humor appreciation, participants evaluated the low audio fluency comedian and
jokes as less funny.
Figure 1.
Humor Ratings for the Comedian and their Jokes by Fluency
19
Note. Error bars represent 95% confidence intervals.
Bustling Noise: The Impact of Audio Fluency on Interest in the Performance & Sharing
Intentions
A greater share of participants were 1) interested in hearing more jokes from the high
fluency comedian (M = 66%, 95% CI = [.60, .73]) than the low fluency comedian (M = 34%,
95% CI = [.27, .40]) and 2) reported they would prefer to see the high fluency comedian live (M
= 67%, 95% CI = [.61, .73]) than the low fluency comedian (M = 33%, 95% CI = [.27, .39]).
When asked if they would like the link to the full performance, a larger proportion of participants
indicated “yes” for the high fluency comedian (M = 39%, 95% CI = [.33, .46]) compared to the
low audio fluency comedian (M = 28%, 95% CI = [.22, .34]). Participants also reported a greater
interest in seeing a live performance of the high fluency comedian they heard than the low audio
fluency comedian (raw mean scale difference = 0.59, 95% CI = [0.34, 0.84]) and a greater
interest in sharing the high audio fluency comedian’s performance with their friends than the low
20
audio fluency comedian’s performance (raw mean scale difference = 0.52, 95% CI = [0.30, 0.74])
(see Figure 2). Post-hoc Bonferroni tests revealed that these mean differences were significant for
all five analyses we performed on participants’ general interest in the performances and sharing
them.
Figure 2.
Participants’ Interest in Seeing the Comedian Live and in Sharing their Performance by Fluency
Note. Error bars represent 95% confidence intervals. Participants rated their interest 1) in seeing
each comedian live and 2) in sharing each comedian’s performance with friends.
Faulty Intuitions: Did Participants Predict This?
In our pretesting survey, only 18% of participants predicted a live comedian would seem
funnier to them in the environment where it is easiest to process jokes (“A really quiet coffee
shop”) compared to the alternative options: “A bustling coffee shop” (51%) or “Makes no
difference” (31%) (see Figure 3).
21
Figure 3.
Participants’ Audio Fluency Predictions in the Pretesting Survey
Note. Error bars represent 95% confidence intervals.
Faulty Intuitions: Do Participants Learn from Their Experience?
Participants assumed a bustling context would improve their humor evaluations of a
comedian. Their actual experimental data showed the opposite. Did they learn from this
experience? Only a minority of participants’ post-study intuitions predicted a comedy
performance would be funnier in a really quiet venue (M = 25%) rather than a bustling one (M =
51%) or makes no difference (M = 24%). We asked participants why they made their predictions
afterward, and we coded peoples’ responses (see Table 4). We included any reasoning cited by at
least 5 participants in our table. The most common reasoning for participants who predicted “the
bustling coffee shop” would be best was that a bustling venue would feel more lively (and less
22
awkward or intimidating), which would be good for comedy (44). A majority of the participants
who made the correct prediction (“A really quiet coffee shop”) reasoned that it would be easier to
focus on and hear the comedian’s jokes (44).
Table 3. The most cited reasoning for peoples’ predictions after Experiment 1
We conducted a separate analysis of the 188 participants who completed both the
pretesting and post-study predictions. We used the “Sison-Glaz” approach for calculating
confidence intervals for multinomial proportions (Sison & Glaz, 1995). There was a small
decrease in participants indicating their belief that the sound levels of a setting make no
difference on humor (Pretesting M = 31%, 95% CI = [.24, .39]); Experiment M = 22%, 95% CI =
[.15, .30]), and there was a small increase in participants indicating their belief that a really quiet
coffee shop would be a better setting for humor (Pretesting M = 17%, 95% CI = [.10, .25];
Experiment M = 27%, 95% CI = [.19, .34]) (see Figure 4). Participants’ mean rating for how
much they think comedy benefits from hustle and bustle (on a 7-point Likert scale (0 (Should be
23
really quiet) - 7 (Hustle and bustle is good)) was a 4.47 (95% CI = [4.27, 4.68]), indicating they
think that comedy benefits from some hustle and bustle.
Figure 4.
Lay Intuitions About Audio Fluency Before and After Experiment 1
Note. Error bars represent 95% confidence intervals. This graph looks at the 188 of 214
Experiment participants who completed both the Pretesting and the Experiment.
Discussion
Our experiment showed that poor audio fluency can decrease peoples’ appreciation of a
joke’s humor. We saw this pattern across peoples’ choices and ratings. People judged the same
joke content and comedian as less funny when they heard it through a recording with bustling
24
background audio that mirrored the acoustics of a bustling coffee shop. They also reported lower
interest in 1) seeing the comedian perform live and 2) sharing each performance when they heard
it in the lower audio fluency setting. A smaller percentage of people 1) requested a link to and 2)
indicated an interest in hearing more jokes from the low fluency comedian’s full performance.
This finding was counter-intuitive for most people. Only a minority of participants
predicted that comedy would be funnier in an otherwise quiet setting. A majority of pre and
post-study participants even predicted the opposite, that comedy would be funnier in a bustling
environment. We saw evidence of only a small percentage of people updating their lay theories
about humor after the experiment, which speaks to the difficulty of learning how contextual
variables affect the perceived humor of a joke. Though we did not test this intuition, we think that
most participants did not update their lay theories because they did not get a chance to compare
the experience of hearing either comedian tell their jokes in both the low and high audio fluency
settings for reference. They only heard one version of each comedian, making it difficult to learn
what the isolated experience of hearing the same comedian tell jokes at different noise levels
would be like. Only a minority of people (25%) at the end of Experiment 1 believed bustling
noise could be bad for comedy. Since many people lacked the intuition that bustling noise could
be bad for comedy, we intuit that many people likely attributed their reduced humor evaluations
of the low audio fluency performances to the comedians and jokes themselves, given their low
ratings of both.
We note that the experience of strictly hearing the interfering noise of a bustling coffee
shop may be different from being in an actual bustling coffee shop. However, we do not intuit
that the additional presence of the distracting visuals, smells, and other sensations of a bustling
25
venue would help neutralize or reverse the effects of bustling noise interfering with one’s
experience processing the jokes in a performance.
Experiment 2: Rhyme and Alliteration and Humor
As we predicted, more participants judged the fluent (rhyming or alliterating) punchlines
as funnier (76%, 95% CI = [.71, .81]) than the less fluent (non-rhyming and non-alliterating)
punchlines (24%, 95% CI = [.19, .29]). A majority of participants judged the rhyming punchlines
as funnier (78%, 95% CI = [.73, .83]) and the alliterating punchlines as funnier (75%, 95% CI =
[.69, .79]) than the control punchlines. Participants preferred the more fluent punchline (over the
control) for 10/10 rhyming and 10/10 alliterating punchlines, as shown in Figure 5 and Figure 6.
Post-hoc Bonferroni tests revealed that these mean differences between items were significant for
all 10 analyses across each alliterating and rhyming punchline.
Figure 5.
Preferences for the Rhyming vs. Non-Rhyming Punchlines
26
Note. Error bars represent 95% confidence intervals.
Figure 6.
Preferences for the Alliterating vs. Non-Alliterating Punchlines
Note. Error bars represent 95% confidence intervals.
Discussion
We expected to find noise in our exploration of whether rhymes and alliterations enhance
the humor of a joke, given that no two synonyms are perfectly equal in their cultural,
connotational, and collocational associations. Though we saw variation in what percentage of
people found each rhyming and alliterating punchline to be funnier than the control for each joke,
a majority of people found each rhyming (10/10) and alliterating (10/10) punchline to be funnier
than the control punchlines. Overall, jokes that contained rhymes or alliterations were funnier
than substantively equal jokes without those aesthetic devices.
27
Although we did not assess processing speed in the present study, previous research has
repeatedly shown that rhyme and alliteration facilitate processing, both in terms of objective
speed and subjective experience (Meyer et al., 1975; Perfetti et al., 1988; Davis et al., 2016). We
would also like to note that we used punchline phrases that only utilized 2 words that rhymed or
alliterated with each other. It is possible that the positive effect of these devices on humor
appreciation could differ for longer strings of rhyming or alliterating words if the strings become
long enough to form a tongue twister, possibly reducing the processing fluency of the punchline.
Chapter Four: General Discussion
Summary
We found that easier processing through “incidental” (audio fluency) and “integral”
(rhyme and alliteration) fluency manipulations led to greater humor appreciation. The results
show strong evidence of a sizable effect. Audio fluency manipulations were sufficient to reverse
peoples’ preferences for comedians to favor whichever comedian had audio that was easier to
process. Further, hearing a low audio fluency performance of a comedian had a greater influence
on peoples’ humor ratings than which substantively different comedian and jokes they heard.
People preferred the more fluent punchline (vs. the less fluent control) for all 10/10 rhyming and
10/10 alliterating punchlines. These results consistently show that humor appreciation is
facilitated by processing fluency, adding humor appreciation to the long list of judgments that are
subject to fluency effects, including judgments of beauty (Reber et al., 2004), truth (Schwarz et
al., 2021), familiarity (Whittlesea et al., 1990), consensus (Jacoby, Kelley, Brown, et al., 1989;
Jacoby, Kelley & Dywan, 1989; Weaver et al., 2007), risk (Dohle & Siegrist, 2014; Song &
Schwarz, 2009), and more.
28
The effects of audio fluency on humor appear counterintuitive to most people. Only a
small percentage of people predicted that an otherwise quiet venue would be good for humor.
Moreover, only a small percentage of people updated their audio fluency intuitions after the
experiment. This presumably reflects that many people misattributed the negative effects of poor
audio fluency to attributes of the comedians and the jokes themselves, consistent with their low
ratings of both. As predicted by feelings-as-information theory (Schwarz, 2012), people perceive
their feelings as a response to whatever they are thinking about unless their attention is explicitly
drawn to an incidental influence.
Caveats
Humor involves the surprising experience of appraising multiple, incompatible
interpretations of a stimulus simultaneously (Warren et al., 2021). This experience should be
sufficient to make humorous statements somewhat disfluent inherently. When good audio quality,
rhyme, or alliteration make it easier to process the incongruity, people evaluate the jokes as
funnier. These fluency effects emerge with material that maintains the surprising incompatibility
of the components. While this observation is likely to be robust across many fluency
manipulations, we predict that increased fluency will not always have beneficial effects.
Increasing fluency by dropping one of the incompatible components would presumably eliminate
the humorous quality of the utterance. Hence, we maintained the incompatible components in the
present experiments. Our “incidental” audio fluency manipulations (Experiment 1) did not
change the content of the comedians’ jokes, which remained consistent across conditions.
Similarly, our “integral” fluency manipulations (Experiment 2) tested substantively equivalent
punchlines (using close synonyms) that preserved the integrity of the main incongruity.
29
Additionally, to control for possible noise between imperfect substantive matches, we tested 10
different jokes for the rhyming and alliterating stimuli, each with a moderately sized sample (N =
273).
The Generalizability of Fluency Effects on Humor Across Diverse Comedic Formats,
Fluency Manipulations, and Audiences
Given there are many different types of jokes (e.g., puns, memes, standup comedy), it is
important to explore humor phenomena across several types of comedy to understand the
generalizability of any one humor phenomenon. As far as comedic stimuli go, previous research
was limited to short question-answer wordplay jokes, presented in a written format, and a few
short narrative wordplay jokes, also presented in a written format (e.g., Two penguins are
walking through the desert. “There must be a lot of ice here.” - “Why?” - “Look how much sand
they have spread.” - Translated from German) (Topolinski, 2014). Our research adds to that by
testing the effects of fluency on observational and disparaging comedy on topical subjects in the
audio format of standup comedy in addition to written non-wordplay-specific fill-in-the-blank
jokes.
There are many ways to manipulate ease of processing. Prior research only looked at the
manipulation of repetition and font difficulty in jokes (Topolinski, 2014) and rhyming fluency in
poetry (Menninghaus, 2014). The added diversity of the manipulations (audio fluency, rhyme,
and alliteration) on different comedy formats in the present studies adds converging evidence of
the effects of fluency on humor.
As humor can vary across cultures, exploring humor phenomena across multiple societies
can help researchers understand the generalizability of any one finding. Effects of fluency on
30
humor have previously only been shown for German participants. Our converging observations
in a U.S. sample suggest that the relationship between humor and fluency holds across Western
cultures.
Potential Applications of Fluency on Humor
From an application perspective, this research also provides actionable advice to
everyone, from professional public speakers to anyone interested in adding humor to their daily
interactions with others. A simple search for rhymes on rhymezone.com or alliterating nouns or
adjectives on a search engine can give communicators a foot in the door to add additional humor
to a joke by making it rhyme or alliterate. Further, an otherwise quiet room, or a lull in a room’s
activity levels, may be one’s best chance at making a good joke shine, and speakers can
proactively create or choose spaces with less audible interference to communicate their jokes.
The present findings demonstrate that fluency manipulations at the stimulus-level and the
presentation-level can affect humor judgments. This suggests that there may be several other
useful applications that facilitate humor. First, there may be other types of stimulus-level fluency
manipulations in the form of aesthetic devices (e.g., snowclones) that can facilitate humor
(without reducing the key simultaneity experience in a joke). Secondly, other presentation-level
fluency manipulations, such as the accent of the speaker or the color contrast of the font of the
jokes, may also affect the humor of a comedian’s jokes.
Though we didn’t explore fluency manipulations at the context-level or person-level,
explorations at these levels are likely to yield productive insights and applications. The context in
which one consumes a joke could affect what concepts are more accessible and relevant in one’s
mind, facilitating easier or more difficult processing for certain punchlines. For example,
31
Easter-related jokes may be funnier when consumed closer to Easter (when Easter-related
concepts are more accessible in one’s mind). How easily a joke is processed could also depend
on attributes of the perceiver, such as the perceiver’s unique knowledge, exposure history, and
goals. In future studies, for example, researchers could look at whether jokes that discuss the
unique experiences of being a female are funnier for female audiences than for male audiences
and vice versa. We suggest a greater exploration into the impact of different fluency
manipulations on humor could be fruitful in identifying practical applications for people to use
when they are trying to communicate with others using humor.
How Does Fluency Affect Humor?
Given the converging evidence in support of fluency as a moderator of humor, many
additional questions are worth exploring.
Does Fluency Interact with the Funniness of a Joke?
One question is whether fluency interacts with the original level of funniness of a joke
such that more funny jokes are more (or less) enhanced by increased fluency than initially less
funny jokes. Future studies should also explore whether there is a non-linear or inverted U
relationship between humor and fluency.
What Is the Process?
While the present studies suggest that the relationship between fluency and humor is
robust, they are silent on the specific underlying process. Is it affect-driven? Is it the result of
metacognitive inferences? Future studies may explore these questions by including affect
misattribution procedures and variations in the temporary accessibility of different lay theories of
fluency (Schwarz et al., 2021).
32
How Does Fluency Integrate with Current Humor Theories?
We propose a few ways the fluency humor relationship may fit into current theories worth
exploring in future research. From the perspective of simultaneity theories of humor, fluency can
increase humor appreciation by facilitating the cognitive switch between one perception and
another simultaneously fitting but incompatible perception. Since the feeling of fluency often
feels positive (Harmon-Jones & Allen, 2001; Monahan et al., 2000; Winkielman et al., 2003;
Winkielman et al., 2006) and results in increased perceived truth of the statement one is
evaluating (Bacon, 1979; Hasher et al., 1977; McGlone & Tofighbakhsh, 2000; Newman &
Schwarz, 2018), fluency may facilitate what would otherwise be a less positive or less coherent
feeling cognitive switch between two incompatible perceptions, making an incongruity seem
funnier. Hence, a fluent joke resolution could feel more compelling than a less fluent one.
Similarly, a fluent joke may seem more benign. In the lens of one specific simultaneity
theory, Benign Violation Theory (McGraw & Warren, 2010; Veatch, 1998), humor requires the
fulfillment of three conditions: (1) a situation is a violation, (2) the situation is benign, and (3)
both perceptions occur simultaneously (Warren et al., 2021). Given that fluency reduces
perceptions of risk and increases perceptions of trust (Schwarz et al., 2021), it may facilitate the
appraisal of a violation as benign.
Future work should assess the relative contributions of these different pathways in more
detail. The antecedents of humor are still yet to be fully understood. However, these findings help
us better understand what drives the experience of humor and help us develop better models for
predicting and creating humorous content.
33
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Appendix A
Experiment 2 Stimuli
40
41
Appendix B
Experiment 1 Questions
Questions from Experiment 1 are listed below.
42
Abstract (if available)
Abstract
Are jokes funnier when they are easier to process? We manipulated fluency in three ways in order to explore this question. First, we presented identical standup comedy audio clips in high or low audio fluency and asked people to evaluate the comedians and their jokes (Experiment 1). We added bustling venue background noise to comedians’ standup comedy clips to create the low audio fluency version of each. People’s comedian preferences reversed depending on which comedian they heard in the low audio fluency condition. Despite identical content, people rated low audio fluency version of each standup comedian and their jokes as less funny. Secondly, we presented jokes with two punchline options: a punchline using (1) alliteration or (2) rhyme and a substantively equivalent punchline with no alliteration or rhyme (Experiment 2). A majority of people judged the rhyming (vs. non-rhyming) punchlines and the alliterating (vs. non-alliterating) punchlines to be funnier. Throughout, easy processing increased funniness. We also explored whether people intuit the negative effects of audio fluency on humor. Only a small percentage of people correctly predicted that a comedy show would seem funnier to them if the venue were “really quiet,” whereas a majority thought otherwise. Only a small percentage of people updated their audio fluency predictions after the experiment, suggesting many people misattributed the negative contextual effects of low audio fluency on their humor evaluations to the comedians and jokes themselves. Our fluency findings are compatible with simultaneity theories of humor, including Benign Violation Theory. How fluency may influence humor judgments, potential boundary conditions for fluency effects, and additional potential applications are discussed.
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Processing the dynamicity of events in language
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Are jokes funnier when they’re easier to process?
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Psychology
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2022-12
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Tags
alliteration
audio fluency
benign violation theory
comedy
humor
processing fluency
rhyme