There is one essen­tial con­di­tion required in com­edy: “some kind of incon­gruity between two ele­ments […], resolved in a play­ful or unex­pected way”.

That’s accord­ing to a fairly com­pre­hen­sive arti­cle sum­maris­ing the neu­ro­science research con­ducted to dis­cover more about the phe­nom­e­non of why we find things funny (or not).

Of par­tic­u­lar inter­est was how we react dif­fer­ently to cer­tain types of jokes depend­ing on our sex and on our per­son­al­ity type:

  • Women use more language-based decod­ing than men–this takes longer.
  • Extro­verts receive greater neural rewards from com­edy than neurotics.
  • ‘Expe­ri­ence seek­ers’ react to spe­cific types of com­edy more than oth­ers: they pre­fer ‘non­sense’ jokes to resolv­able jokes (the lat­ter is tech­ni­cally called “incongruity-resolution humour”).

The crux: a joke’s con­tent seems to be sec­ondary to how it is solved (neu­ro­log­i­cally speak­ing) if you’re tar­get­ing a cer­tain audience:

Although you might expect the sub­ject mat­ter — music or pol­i­tics, for exam­ple — to deter­mine joke pref­er­ence, [researcher Andrea Sam­son] found that it is the way a joke is solved that is most impor­tant. “The logic by which the incon­gruity is resolved mat­ters most, in terms of what kind of per­son a joke appeals to,” she says.

via Arts and Let­ter Daily