Belief revision and incongruity: is it a joke?

Even if much has been written about ingredients that trigger laughter, researchers are still far from having completely understood their interplay in the cognitive process that leads a listener to guffaw at a pun or a joke. They are even farther from a detailed analysis and modeling of the mechanisms that are at work in this process. However, in recent articles Dupin de Saint-Cyr and Prade (2020, 2022) took a first step in this direction by laying bare that a belief revision mechanism was solicited in the reception of a narrative joke. Namely the punchline, which triggers a revision, is both surprising and explains perfectly what was reported in the beginning of the joke. A similar idea has been more informally proposed in Ritchie (2002). It is quite clear that this is insufficient for characterizing a narrative joke.