Laughing Across the Bridge: The Role of Associative Abilities in Humor

Humor is theoretically grounded in the capacity to link unrelated concepts in surprising ways. Central to humor theories is the concept of incongruity—a conceptual gap between seemingly unrelated ideas that, when bridged, elicits surprise and amusement. Therefore, associative abilities—the capacity to combine disparate ideas stored in memory—are hypothesized to shape humor skills and perception. Across two studies, we explored the role of associative abilities in humor, via humor ratings of word pairs (Study 1) and human-created jokes (Study 2), as well as humor production (Study 2). Through converging statistical analyses, our results suggest a positive effect of associative abilities on both humor appreciation and production. Furthermore, this effect was found to be mediated by incongruity, surprise, and comprehension levels of humor. Specifically, individuals with higher associative abilities tend to generate more incongruent humor that is perceived by others as more surprising but less comprehensible. Moreover, these individuals tend to perceive others’ humor as more comprehensible but less surprising. Furthermore, our findings expand on the incongruity theory by exploring its boundaries, revealing that incongruity can diminish humor not only when it is too low, but also when it is too high. Our results suggest that humor is most appreciated when incongruity is moderate, hitting the sweet spot between surprise and comprehension. Together, our findings suggest a new perspective on the relationship between humor and incongruity—a complex interplay driven by a general cognitive mechanism of associative ability.