An adult joke sneaks a payload of ordinary-seeming, actually combustible ingredients into the mind; the "Aha" moment produces an unmentionable thought that pops up unexpectedly into your head

Raizada, Rajeev. 2020. “A Payload-ignition Theory of Adult-oriented Humour: TUUTU (a Thought That Is Unmentionable and Unmentioned, Triggered Unexpectedly).” PsyArXiv. June 19. doi:10.31234/osf.io/fyqx8

Abstract: A funny joke achieves a sort of sleight-of-hand: in its set up, it sneaks a payload of ordinary-seeming but actually combustible ingredients into your mind. The punchline then induces a mindshift, which jostles those ingredients around. This mindshift leads to the "Aha" moment of you getting the joke: the payload ignites, producing an unmentionable thought that pops up unexpectedly into your head. That sudden appearance in your mind of an unmentionable thought is, the present theory claims, the crucial ingredient that makes adult-directed humour funny. That claim and the payload-ignition model together form the two novel ingredients of the theory of humour that is proposed here. "Unmentionable" here means something that one would not say out loud in polite company, due to it being outrageous in some way, e.g. taboo, rude, or titillating. This unmentionable-thought payload is proposed to be a crucial and previously overlooked characteristic of adult-oriented humour. However, it is noticeably absent from child-friendly humour and from most puns, thereby explaining why such jokes are rarely very funny, and why studying puns may have obscured the role of unmentionable thoughts from previous theories. Existing theories of humour have individually devoted their attention only to one aspect of the payload-ignition combination: the classical theories of release and of superiority focused only on the payload, and contemporary theories such as incongruity resolution, bisociation, semantic scripts and error detection have focused only on the mindshift that triggers ignition. The present proposal is consistent with those previous theories, but extends them by adding the new elements of the unmentionable thought and the payload-ignition framework. Examples are presented and analysed of jokes and the unmentionable thoughts that they elicit. It is also shown how removing the unmentionable thought from a joke, while leaving all other elements the same, drains the joke of its humour. The present theory does not claim single-handedly to capture all aspects of humour, and some examples are discussed that remain beyond its grasp. However, it does newly highlight two crucial aspects, missed by previous theories, of what makes a joke funny. Finally, several testable predictions generated by the theory are presented.