Humor comprehension: Lessons learned from cross-cultural communication

Research on humor has tended to focus on its production. The understanding of humor, perhaps because it is more difficult to document, has received somewhat less attention, especially from a sociolinguistic perspective. The present paper addresses this gap by using examples of humor in crosscultural interaction to propose ways in which two earlier models suggesting how humor is perceived (Carrell 1997) and supported (Hay 2001) may be further developed. These examples show that joke competence is a somewhat dynamic construct, that understanding can be partial and that lack of full understanding need not preclude appreciation. In addition, I suggest that interlocutors' understanding of the wide variety of functions of humor must also be taken into consideration in any broader theory of how humor is perceived and understood. As understanding, like language use, is interactively constructed, I call for a view of humor comprehension that is social, as well as cognitive.