Comedy is funnier when it is easier to process, new psychology study finds

Comedy is funnier when it is easier to process, largely because fluency helps incongruous material make sense, according to research published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

Humour often depends on incongruity: something happens that conflicts with what an audience expects. But surprise alone is not enough. For an incongruity to be funny, people must notice it while still being able to understand how its conflicting elements fit together. If a joke is too confusing, meaningless, or threatening, it is less likely to succeed.

Processing fluency, the subjective experience that something is easy to perceive or understand, may help comedy achieve this balance. Fluent processing can make information feel more coherent and familiar, but it can also produce positive feelings that might make a violation seem less threatening.

Because earlier evidence was largely limited to text-based riddles, Drew Gorenz and Norbert Schwarz examined whether fluency would enhance appreciation of more familiar comedic formats and whether it worked primarily by increasing perceived coherence or by making potentially offensive humour seem more benign.

Across four experiments, the researchers analyzed data from 999 participants recruited through a U.S. university psychology subject pool, including 248 in Experiment 1, 273 in Experiment 2, 206 in Experiment 3, and 272 in Experiment 4. In Experiment 1, participants viewed eight internet memes, four in their original form and four degraded by reducing their exposure and colour saturation. They rated each meme’s funniness from 0, “not funny at all,” to 6, “very funny,” and its ease of processing from 1, “difficult,” to 101, “easy.” They also reported how frequently they encountered memes and sought out comedy in everyday life on seven-point scales. The order of the funniness and fluency ratings was counterbalanced.

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In Experiment 2, participants completed 25 fill-in-the-blank jokes and selected the funnier of two substantively similar punchlines. Ten pairs compared rhyming with non-rhyming punchlines, ten compared alliterating with non-alliterating punchlines, and five were fillers. Experiments 3 and 4 presented eight short scenarios describing people who had received nicknames. Experiment 3 used aggressive nicknames, whereas Experiment 4 included both aggressive and benign ones; the researchers varied whether each nickname alliterated with the person’s name.

Participants rated funniness from 0 to 6, ease of processing from 1 to 101, and coherence from 0 to 6 using three items assessing whether the nickname sounded right, seemed fitting, and was likely to be used by the person’s peers. They also answered yes-or-no questions about whether each nickname could be considered “wrong” and “not wrong,” allowing the researchers to identify nicknames perceived as both violations and benign. All experiments also collected demographic information.

In Experiment 1, degraded memes were rated as substantially harder to process and, on average, 0.65 points less funny than the original versions. Participants who reported encountering memes more frequently also found the study’s memes easier to process and funnier. The mediation findings were consistent with the proposed explanation, such that, the visual manipulation’s relationship with humour was fully accounted for by experienced fluency, while fluency accounted for approximately half of the relationship between prior meme exposure and humour ratings.

In Experiment 2, participants selected the fluent punchline as funnier 76.45% of the time, compared with 23.55% for the alternative. This preference appeared for both rhyming punchlines, selected 78.38% of the time, and alliterating punchlines, selected 74.53% of the time.

The nickname experiments produced a similar pattern. In Experiment 3, alliterating aggressive nicknames were rated as easier to process, more coherent, and funnier than non-alliterating versions. In Experiment 4, alliterating nicknames were again easier to process and were rated 2.22 out of 6 for funniness, compared with 1.90 for non-alliterating nicknames; this benefit did not reliably differ between benign and aggressive nicknames.

Across both experiments, the relationship between alliteration and funniness was fully accounted for by greater experienced fluency and coherence. Alliteration did not make the nicknames more likely to be judged benign or less likely to be considered violations, offering no evidence that fluency increased humour by softening their aggressive or inappropriate qualities.

Given participants were predominantly young U.S. university students and the stimuli were limited to memes, punchlines, and nicknames, the findings may not generalize to broader populations or every form of comedy.

Together, these findings identify processing fluency as a potentially broad principle of humour appreciation.

The research, “Is comedy funnier when it is easier to process? The interplay of fluency and coherence in humor appreciation,” was authored by Drew Gorenz and Norbert Schwarz.