The semantic foundations of cognitive theories of humor

This article argues for a parallelism between the foundations of the General Theory of Verbal Humor and the incongruity-resolution models. The incongruity phase is found to correspond to the script opposition knowledge resource and the resolution phase is argued to be identical to the logical mechanism. The necessity of a setup phase, preceding the other two in the incongruity-resolution models, is argued for; this phase is matched to the script overlap. Revisions of the definition of the script opposition and logical mechanism are presented. The consequences of these redefinitions for the theory and humor research at large are examined.