ABSTRACT
There is a long history of associating surprise with humour, but so far no surprise theory of humour has been developed. We investigate this area in three different ways. Firstly, we consider the possible alignments of the time sequence of the experience of surprise with the course of joke comprehension, to see whether some phase of surprise could contribute to the final stage amusement. Secondly, we consider how three recent models of surprise could describe the effects which occur within jokes. Lastly, we try to determine what abstract notion of surprise can be extracted from past writing about humour and surprise. The overall conclusion is that it is hard to see how the notion of surprise can be used to illuminate the humorous nature of jokes, and some possible relations between surprise and joke comprehension seem to be mere relabellings of incongruity-resolution accounts.
