The Complexity of Jokes Is Limited by Cognitive Constraints on Mentalizing

Abstract

Although laughter is probably of deep evolutionary origin, the telling of jokes, being languagebased, is likely to be of more recent origin within the human lineage. In language-based communication, speaker and listener are engaged in a process of mutually understanding each other's intentions (mindstates), with a conversation minimally requiring three orders of intentionality. Mentalizing is cognitively more demanding than non-mentalizing cognition, and there is a well-attested limit at five orders in the levels of intentionality at which normal adult humans can work. Verbal jokes commonly involve commentary on the mindstates of third parties, and each such mindstate adds an additional level of intentionality and its corresponding cognitive load. We determined the number of mentalizing levels in a sample of jokes told by well-known professional comedians and show that most jokes involve either three or five orders of intentionality on the part of the comedian, depending on whether or not the joke involves other individuals' mindstates. Within this limit there is a positive correlation between increasing levels of intentionality and subjective ratings of how funny the jokes are. The quality of jokes appears to peak when they include five to six levels of intentionality, which suggest that audiences appreciate higher mentalizing complexity whilst working within their natural cognitive constraints. KeywordsMentalizing; Jokes; Intentionality; Cognitive demand Correspondence to: R.I.M. Dunbar. Robin Dunbar is a professor of evolutionary psychology in the Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford. He is director of the Social and Evolutionary Neuroscience Research Group, which explores the evolutionary, ecological and neuropsychological underpinnings of sociality in primates and humans. Jacques Launay is a postdoctoral researcher in the Social and Evolutionary Neuroscience Research Group, University of Oxford. He studies the mechanisms of large-scale social bonding. Oliver Scott Curry is a lecturer in cognitive anthropology at the University of Oxford. He works on moral psychology and crosscultural variation in moral values. Laughter and humor are ubiquitous aspects of human behavior (Gervais and Wilson 2005), and laughter at least has a very ancient origin that may even predate the origins of the hominin lineage (Davila Ross et al. 2009;Dunbar et al. 2012). Despite this, laughter itself has been the focus of only limited research (Provine 1996). Although humor has attracted much more attention, this has primarily been the province of philosophers, psychologists, and language scholars rather than evolutionarily oriented researchers. More recently, however, there has been growing interest in the ultimate functions of laughter and humor. Laughter and humor may play a number of different (not always mutually exclusive) roles in human communication, including expediting courtship, facilitating the flow of an interaction/conversation, synchronizing emotional states, and social bonding (Bachorowsk...

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