ABSTRACT
Humor depends upon the discernment of an appropriate incongruity. The demands for novelty in joketelling are far greater than in taletelling. Tales and jokes are not usually performed by the same narrators. Jokes are often told in the past tense, and a tale could be narrated in the present tense and still remain essentially a tale. Some jokes endure in memory over decades and are continually retold. There are longer jokes and shorter tales, and certainly, there are numerous jokes that are multi-episodic as there are tales that consist of only a single episode. Nevertheless, brevity is not the sole means for controlling information. Indeed there are numerous jokes that could be abbreviated without altering their underlying conceptual structures, but whose abbreviation would not necessarily result in better jokes. Jokes that make no use of wordplay nevertheless make use of dialogue punchlines.
