Articles

We give a brief outline of key issues and a summary of the various different approaches taken by participants in the research field. The outlook is optimistic: a lot has been achieved in 10 years. When heckled, professional comedians frequently lament that "everyone's a comedian!" It's easy to see why: professional comedians don't possess different kinds of brains from others or engage in radically different kinds of behaviors from others, and moreover, the success of their acts is predicated on others' shared ability to understand and reason about comic situations they describe. The difference between comedians and their audience is a matter not of kind, but of degree, a difference that is reflected in the vocational emphasis they place on humor.