ABSTRACT
In this book, we have not presented a theory of what constitutes a joke, but we have offered conjectures about the mechanisms of joke comprehension, bringing together ideas which are often treated as very separate. Our proposals are strongly based on non-humorous text processing, and are more detailed and integrated than previous accounts of joke comprehension. Nevertheless, there is a great deal that could be done to develop this line of work: improving the abstract components, applying these methods to more jokes, formulating some hypotheses about what makes a text a joke, empirical psychological testing and generalising beyond jokes to other forms of humour. This means that we have made just a small step along the road to a theory of humour.
