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The Journal of General Psychology

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The Effect of Humor on Memory: Constrained by the Pun

Hannah Summerfelt , Louis Lippman & Ira E. Hyman Jr.
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Western Washington University Version of record first published: 29 Sep 2010.

To cite this article: Hannah Summerfelt , Louis Lippman & Ira E. Hyman Jr. (2010): The Effect of Humor on Memory: Constrained by the Pun, The Journal of General Psychology, 137:4, 376-394 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00221309.2010.499398

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The Journal of General Psychology, 2010, 137(4), 376394 Copyright C 2010 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

The Effect of Humor on Memory: Constrained by the Pun

HANNAH SUMMERFELT LOUIS LIPPMAN IRA E. HYMAN JR. Western Washington University

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ABSTRACT. In a series of experiments, we investigated the effect of pun humor on memory. In all experiments, the participants were exposed to knock-knock jokes in either the original form retaining the pun or in a modied form that removed the pun. In Experiment 1, the authors found that pun humor improved both recall and recognition memory following incidental encoding. In Experiment 2, they found evidence that rehearsal is not the cause of the humor effect on memory. In Experiments 3 and 4, the authors found that the constraints imposed by puns and incongruity may account for the humor effects observed. Puns constrain and limit the information that can t in the nal line of a joke and thus make recall easier. Keywords: constraints in reconstruction, humor, memory, memory reconstruction

DESPITE THE WIDESPREAD USE OF HUMOR as an intended memory aid, the research on humors effect on memory is inconsistent. Humor is often used in advertising (Spotts, Weinberger, & Parsons, 1997), and researchers have found that consumer comprehension of and positive effect toward an advertisement increases when humor is added to the content of an advertisement (Gelb & Pickett, 1983; Madden & Weinberger, 1982; Weinberger & Gulas, 1992). Nonetheless, humor does not always improve memory for advertisement information (Berg & Lippman, 2001; Krishnan & Chakravarti, 2003). In education, humor is widely encouraged as a pedagogical tool, though primarily as a way to increase the positive associations with the class (Powell & Andresen, 1985). In classes where humor use has been controlled and manipulated, students show increased participation and interest in the class but do not consistently show better memory for class information or
Portions of this research were conducted as part of Hannah Summerfelts MA thesis at Western Washington University and have been presented at the Northwest Cognition and Memory conference. Address correspondence to Ira E. Hyman Jr., Psychology Department, Western Washington University, 516 High St., Bellingham, WA 98225, USA; ira.hyman@wwu.edu (e-mail).
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higher nal grades (Kaplan & Pascoe, 1977; LoSchiavo & Shatz, 2005; Ziv, 1988). The inconsistent ndings regarding humor and memory may reect that humor does not have a direct effect on memory. Instead, humor may work indirectly through other mechanisms, such as rehearsal, surprise, arousal, incongruity, or constraints on the reconstructive process. Humor effects may operate through rehearsal, a basic memory tactic. Humor may trigger additional rehearsal of an item if participants enjoy repeating a joke or a punch line, want to memorize it for later retelling, or think more about a humorous item. However, Vella-Broderick, Jory, and Whelan (unpublished manuscript cited in Schmidt & Williams, 2001) found an effect of humor on sentence recall both in situations where participants were allowed to set their own pace (allowing rehearsal), and in situations in which the researcher set the pace (controlling for rehearsal). Schmidt and Williams (2001) argued that while participants might rehearse humor, rehearsal may not be the relevant mechanism for humors effect on memory. Emotional aspects of humor have also been proposed as the manner through which humor aids memory. For example, surprise can be an effective memory aid because it creates a moment of focused attention and the potential for the rehearsal of the surprising material. Unexpected humor can create a surprise situation (Schmidt & Williams, 2001). In experimental settings, however, the effect of humor through surprise is generally lessened or eliminated by informing the participants that they will see humorous material or by labeling items with the words humorous and non-humorous (Schmidt, 1994). Thus, although surprise may aid memory for humorous material, it rarely is found to be the causal mechanism in laboratory studies. Similarly, moderate levels of arousal facilitate performance, and some researchers have suggested that humor has an indirect effect on memory by creating an effective level of arousal (Derks, Gardner, & Agarwal, 1998; Maher & Van Giffen, 1988). Lippman and Tragesser (2005) suggested that a participants attempt to understand a joke may lead to moderate levels of arousal and thus enhance memory. They reported an inverted-U relationship between the difculty of nding the humor in a joke and a humor response. Perceived funniness in a joke increases as humor becomes less obvious and harder to nd, until the effort required to understand the joke becomes too much. Arousal resulting from a humor response should follow the same inverted-U pattern as the humor response, but arousal as a result of the attempt to understand a joke should follow a steady increase as a joke becomes more difcult and frustration increases. Incongruity has also been suggested as a mechanism for the effect of humor on memory. In the context of humor research, the term incongruity has been used in two different ways. First is as a synonym for distinctiveness, as when a piece of information is presented in such a way that makes it distinct within its context. Distinctive items are remembered more easily (e.g., Pillsbury & Raush, 1943; Wallace, 1965) and in certain circumstances, humor may further contribute to the saliency of an already distinctive item. For example, Kintsch and Bates (1977)

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asked students to remember verbatim phrases presented in a university lecture and found that humorous sentences that were unrelated to the lecture were remembered better than other sentences from the lecture. The second use of incongruity describes what often makes humorous material funny. Appropriate incongruity happens when a situation or statement both does and does not make sense simultaneously. When information is simply incongruous, it makes no sense and may be confusing or frustrating. When the incongruity is appropriate, the information is often found to be funny. Thus, appropriate incongruity or internal incongruity are phrases that refer to the unexpected endings that characterize most joke punch lines (Oring, 1989, 1995). The words or meaning of a punch line often jar with the rest of the joke, creating internal incongruity that leads to a brief moment of confusion and then an aha moment similar to solving a puzzle. This internal incongruity in jokes ranges from simple expectation violations to elaborate incongruity. Deckers and Devine (1981) argued that a listener must have an incorrect expectation of how a joke will end to nd the joke funny. Incongruity may be considered appropriate incongruity when the unexpected ending makes sense as a punch line, while also providing a meaningful deviation from expectation. A pun provides this appropriate incongruity because pun words often have one meaning while alternate meanings are produced by different interpretations of the sounds of the words. Puns, in particular, depend on this internal incongruity in that their humor relies solely on wordplay. In some cases, appropriate incongruity may explain humors effect on memory because participants may engage in an attempt to understand the joke, thus focusing their attention on the humor. However, Schmidt and Williams (2001) used non-humorous cartoons in which nonsensical incongruous information was inserted. Participants had better memory for humorous cartoons despite effort to understand the incongruities both in humorous and non-humorous cartoons. Thus, appropriate incongruity creates humor, but it may not explain increased memory for humorous material. An additional mechanism for explaining the effect of humor on memory concerns how constraints in jokes and punch lines guide accurate reconstruction of a joke. A piece of information is constrained to the extent that characteristics cannot be changed without the information losing meaning. To recall a line in a poem correctly, a person must preserve the meaning in the line, the poetic rhythm, and the rhyme scheme (Rubin, 1995). Multiple constraints lead to accurate memory through reconstruction. For example, if a person needs to remember a word and knows that the word is one syllable, is a body part, and rhymes with red, these multiple constraints would make head come to mind quite easily compared to having fewer constraints concerning the word. Constraints can include restrictions on meaning, rhyme scheme, rhythm, storyline plot expectations, melody, and in some cases physical movements. Rubin (1995) argued that multiple constraints have more than an additive effect: Each additional constraint makes correct recall more likely. For ballads or epic poems, constraints on meaning, structure, rhyme scheme, storyline, and melody contribute to a singers memory in such a way

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that the structure of the ballad is followed very closely. Multiple constraints act together to provide strong memory cues for the words in a song leading to generally accurate recall and errors that are consistent with the constraints (Hyman & Rubin, 1990; Wallace & Rubin, 1991). Very short poetic pieces may be so tightly constrained that they change very little in transmission from person to person over a long period of time (Rubin, 1995). Counting-out rhymes (short verses recited by children to determine roles in an activity) can have a continued existence upwards of 150 years with no signicant change, as Eenie Meenie Miney Mo has had in the United States (Rubin, 1995). These verses are constrained by consistent and distinct rhythms, rhymes, movements, and meaning patterns. Short jokes follow a similar pattern of constraints, limited by the structure of the joke, acoustic properties (with puns and other word play), rhythm (i.e., limericks), and meaningful content. These constraints guide one toward the punch line. With these constraints, short jokes should be more memorable than similar pieces of information that do not follow joke form. To investigate the effects of humor on memory, researchers have used cartoons (Schmidt, 2002; Schmidt & Williams, 2001), jokes (Schmidt, 1994; Thompson, 2001), and short pun statements (Lippman, Bennington & Sucharski, 2002; Lippman & Dunn, 2000; Lippman, Sucharski, & Bennington, 2001). Although much shorter than ballads or songs, short-form humor may also rely on constraints, because in a short joke, humor is lost with even a slight deviation from the original. Meaning, structure, and sound patterns must all be preserved for a pun joke to retain its humor. A cartoon must match the meaning of the picture and caption. A joke of moderate length requires a nearly verbatim re-telling of at least the punch line and a pun requires verbatim recall of the pun words. The four experiments in this paper were designed to investigate the effect of humor on memory. University undergraduates were tested for incidental memory of knock-knock jokes. In Experiment 1, we demonstrated that the names used in knock-knock jokes with puns were better remembered than rewritten jokes without puns. In Experiment 2, we found that the improved memory observed in Experiment 1 most likely is not the result of increased effort or rehearsal produced by humorous items. In Experiment 3, we found that puns improved the ability to reconstruct the entire punch line, supporting the constraints as contributing to humor effects on memory. In the nal experiment, we found that the distinctive form of incongruity also contributes to the effect of humor on memory. EXPERIMENT 1 Because humor effects on memory have not been found consistently, the purpose of our rst experiment was to test for a humor effect using simple puns. To accomplish this goal, original and rewritten knock-knock jokes were presented to university students. Knock-knock jokes were rewritten by removing the pun (and the humor) while retaining the original format. Knock-knock jokes were used because of their simplicity, familiar form, and manipulability. Additionally,

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the nal sentence in each item contained a common human name, providing a convenient and consistent memory target. Method Participants Participants were 107 introductory psychology students at Western Washington University. Participants volunteered for a choice of studies as a partial fulllment of a class requirement. Mean age was 21.03 years (SD = 5.27). Twenty-four participants were male, 83 were female.

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Materials and Procedure At the start of the experiment, all participants were given a packet including a consent form, a demographics page asking for age and sex, a page for rating joke funniness, a 160 problem multiplication distracter task, and a blank page for free recall. Participants were given vocal instructions to not turn pages unless they were told to do so. Instructions for each section were both written in the packet and read aloud by the experimenter. Additionally, at the end of each section in the packet, large print capital letters repeated the instruction to not turn the page. After completing the consent form and demographics, participants were informed that they would watch a PowerPoint slideshow of 30 jokes and were given instructions to rate each joke for humor. Each slide showed one knock-knock joke and slides changed automatically every 10 seconds. Participants gave each joke a funniness rating from 1, not at all funny, to 5, extremely funny. These funniness ratings were used to ensure that participants attended to each slide, and the ratings additionally served as a manipulation check to determine whether participants viewed original knock-knock jokes as funnier than the rewritten jokes in the slideshow. To provide a humor difference in the jokes, a new punch line was written for each joke by removing the pun. Rewritten knock-knock jokes retained the form and appearance of the original knock-knock joke. Each rewritten punch line matched the original punch line in approximate length and number of syllables, and all punch lines (original and rewritten) used a name as the rst or second word. Two examples of original and rewritten knock-knock jokes can be found in Table 1. In each of eight slideshows, 15 original jokes were intermingled with 15 rewritten jokes. The eight rotations varied the order of names and presentation with or without a pun to eliminate serial position bias and the chance that a certain name might be more memorable than others. Each slideshow used the same 30 names, shown only once. Across the eight slideshows, each name was in both an original knock-knock joke and a rewritten item, so that each name was presented both with and without a pun. After the slide show ended, participants were instructed to turn the page and were told to complete the arithmetic task as quickly and accurately as they were

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TABLE 1. Examples of Knock-Knock Jokes Original joke using Oswald Knock knock! Whos there? Oswald. Oswald who? Oswald my chewing gum! Original joke using Harlow Rewritten joke using Oswald Knock knock! Whos there? Oswald. Oswald who? Oswald eats vegetables! Rewritten joke using Harlow Knock knock! Whos there? Harlow. Harlow who? Harlow likes to party!

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Knock knock! Whos there? Harlow. Harlow who? Harlow can you go?

able. After ve minutes, participants were asked to stop and begin the recall task, regardless of the number of math problems completed. Participants were given ve minutes to write all the names they could remember from the slideshow. Next, the experimenter handed out the materials for the recognition memory task. The recognition test consisted of a list of 60 names, 30 names that had appeared in the slideshow mixed with 30 new names. Each of the 30 new names was a counterpart to one old name, matched on the starting letter, whether it was a male or female name, and approximate number of hits when typed into the Google search engine (for example, Greg and Gary, Lena and Leah, and Carmen and Carla). Participants were given 5 minutes to indicate whether the names were old or new. Finally, participants were debriefed concerning the purpose of the experiment. Only a few participants completed the math distracter task in less than 5 minutes, and all participants indicated completion of the memory tasks before the 5 minutes for each task had expired. Results Participants found the original jokes to be more humorous (Mean humor rating = 2.15, SD = 0.51) than rewritten items (M = 1.13, SD = 0.19), t (106) = 20.71, p < .001, Cohens d = 2.91. However, since participants gave the original jokes a mean rating per item of two out of ve, they did not nd even the unmodied knock-knock jokes to be particularly funny. Additionally, a satiation effect was found showing that participants rated the rst 10 items presented as funnier (M = 1.71, SD = .37) than the last 10 items (M = 1.48, SD = .32), t (106) = 6.924, p < .001, Cohens d = 0.67. The counterbalancing of humor and names in the

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slideshows and rotated presentation sequences means that the satiation trend was obtained across humorous and non-humorous materials alike. We found an effect of humor on memory on both the recall and recognition tasks. Participants had better recall for names that were in original jokes (M = 3.73, SD = 2.07) than names that were in rewritten jokes (M = 2.20, SD = 1.75), t (106) = 6.994, p < .001, Cohens d = 0.80. In addition, participants had better recognition for names that were in original jokes (M = 11.79, SD = 2.12) than names that were in rewritten jokes (M = 10.19, SD = 2.38), t (106) = 7.28, p < .001, Cohens d = 0.71. Signal detection analysis using d scores, which were determined using a table created by Hochhaus (1972), indicated good discrimination between old and new names in the recognition task for both names associated with a pun (M = 1.81, SD = 0.75) and names from rewritten punch lines (M = 1.38, SD = 0.89). Participants had better d scores for names associated with a pun than names in rewritten items, t (106) = 5.61, p < .001, Cohens d = 0.52. The recognition hit rate for names from original jokes was M = 11.79, and the false alarm rate for original joke name counterparts was M = 3.19. The hit rate for names from rewritten items was M = 10.19, and the false alarm for rewritten item name counterparts was M = 3.48. Being associated with a pun not only improved the participants ability to recall a name, but to distinguish the name from the false counterpart more accurately. Discussion We found that although there was a humor difference between original and rewritten jokes, the original jokes were not particularly funny to participants. For this reason, we ruled out arousal as an explanation for the humor effect in this experiment. It is unlikely that the slightly funny humor rating created the optimum level of arousal in participants to cause better memory of the names. Even so, participants were better able to remember the names from the original jokes. Humor may improve memory, but in Experiment 1, the memory effect cannot be satisfactorily explained by the humor-created arousal in original jokes. It is more likely that something else about the original jokes facilitated memory. One possibility is differential rehearsal of original and rewritten items (Schmidt & Williams, 2001). Participants may think about or rehearse a humorous item more than a rewritten one, perhaps because it makes sense, is enjoyable to think about, or because they wish to remember it for future retelling. Thus, in Experiment 2, we examined rehearsal patterns for the items. EXPERIMENT 2 Method Participants Participants were 39 (10 male, 29 female) introductory psychology students at Western Washington University who had not participated in Experiment 1.

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Participants volunteered as in Experiment 1. Mean age was 20.26 years (SD = 1.09). Materials and Procedure We used four slideshow rotations from Experiment 1. Slides changed automatically every 20 seconds to give participants time to rate each knock-knock joke on four statements regarding rehearsal. Each statement was rated on a 1 to 5 scale from disagree to agree. The rst statement was that it took effort to interpret the nal sentence. The participants then rated whether they tended to re-read the nal sentence. The third statement was that they tended to repeat the nal sentence, and the fourth statement was that they repeated the name in the punch line. Results For two of the ratings, we found a difference between original and rewritten jokes that was the opposite direction as predicted by the rehearsal hypothesis. Participants reported that it took more effort to interpret rewritten jokes (M = 2.71, SD = 1.13) than jokes in their original form (M = 1.69, SD = 0.54), t (35) = 4.905, p < .001, Cohens d = 1.22. Participants also reread the punch lines of rewritten jokes (M = 2.41, SD = 0.89) more than the punch lines of jokes in their original form (M = 1.74, SD = 0.52), t (35) = 3.70, p = .001, Cohens d = 0.95. This is the opposite pattern of what would be expected if humor promoted attention or repetition. Participants reported thinking harder about and more frequently rereading punch lines when they contained no pun than when they contained a pun. Although the other two response items did not meet standard statistical significance, there were trends in the same direction of moderate effect size. Participants reported repeating the punch lines of rewritten jokes (M = 2.29, SD = 0.87) more than jokes in their original form (M = 1.94, SD = 0.69), t (35) = 1.976, p = .056, Cohens d = 0.45, and they reported repeating the names used in rewritten jokes (M = 2.40, SD = 0.87) more than the names from jokes in their original form (M = 2.04, SD = 0.83), t (35) = 1.985, p = .055, Cohens d = 0.42. The presence of pun humor did not lead to more rehearsal. Discussion Contrary to what would be expected if rehearsal drives humor effects, we found more rehearsal and more effort was reported for the rewritten items than the original humorous items. In retrospect, these rehearsal patterns make sense. When participants encountered an item with no pun, they reread and thought harder in an attempt to understand the joke. Because the participants for this experiment were from the same population and saw the same slideshows as those in Experiment 1, their rehearsal and effort

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behavior should be highly similar. Therefore, even though participants spent more time and effort interpreting the rewritten items, they still remembered the names from the original, humorous jokes better than the rewritten items. Rehearsal may be an effective memory aid, but it appears not to be the explanation for the effect of humor on memory we observed in Experiment 1. It is important to note, however, that these rehearsal patterns probably resulted from a violation of the expectation of humor (participants expected to see a pun). Individuals should be less likely to rehearse a non-humorous item if it appeared in a context in which the participants do not expect humor. Nonetheless, these rehearsal patterns are important for our research because they rule out the possibility that rehearsal is responsible for the memory effect in our experiments. EXPERIMENT 3 In Experiment 3, we investigated how the constraints of a pun guided memory construction for knock-knock jokes. Rubin (1995) argued that constraints aid in the reconstruction of verbal materials. The punch line of a knock-knock joke has several constraints: At minimum, there must be at least one pun, based on the word or phrase uttered in response to Whos there? Additionally, there are usually other words in the punch line that are semantically associated with the pun, but not necessarily acoustically associated (the punch line makes sense as a complete sentence, but not all words need to play off the pun). For many knock-knock jokes, a third constraint on the meaning of the punch line relates to the action of knocking on a door or the question of, Whos there? (e.g., Lena little closer and Ill tell you! or Shirley you know me by now!). In this experiment, we tested whether the pun acts as a constraint to guide reconstruction of the entire punch line. Following incidental encoding, participants were asked to remember the entire last sentence (punch line) in addition to the name from each joke. If the pun is an important constraint, then participants should have better memory for all the words in an original punch line, because the names participation in a pun should cue the semantically related words in the rest of the punch line. We tested this prediction by using both free recall of the entire punch line and cued recall when given the pun name. Method Participants Participants were 121 introductory psychology students at Western Washington University who had not participated in Experiments 1 or 2. Participants volunteered as in prior experiments. Mean age was 19.29 years (SD = 1.64). Thirty-one participants were male, 89 were female (one participant did not respond).

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Materials and Procedure Procedure and materials were identical to those used in Experiment 1, including the rotations of names and humor in the eight slideshows and the use of the 5-minute math distracter task. In Experiment 3, we used two additional memory tasks. Following the free recall task in which participants were instructed to write down as many names as possible, participants were asked to write the entire last sentence of as many items as they could remember on a separate blank sheet of paper. Participants were encouraged to guess. The recognition task used in Experiment 1 was next, followed by a cued recall task in which all 30 names used in the slideshow were listed with a large blank box next to each name. Participants were asked to write down all the punch lines from the slideshow using the names as memory cues. Scoring Participants responses to the two new memory tasks were typed and presented to three independent judges to score for quality. Judges were three psychology graduate students at Western Washington University. A list of correct punch lines, alphabetized by name, was provided so that they could compare participants responses with the correct punch line. Judges were rst given practice materials consisting of examples of two joke punch lines that were not in these experiments, in both original form and rewritten form with no pun. Under each of the punch lines were 6 to 10 fabricated sample participant responses as if generated by participants attempting to remember that punch line. These were typed into a form that looked the same as the real judging form. Fabricated participant responses were designed to be similar to participant responses. Judges were trained to use a 5-point scale with the practice materials. Judges scored each response based on how closely a participants response matched verbatim accuracy. Criteria for accuracy can be found in Table 2. Spelling and punctuation were not considered important as long as the meaning of the words

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TABLE 2. Judging Criteria for Experiment 3 5 = Perfect, verbatim. 4 = Almost perfect, no more than 2 words are missing, different, or out of place. 3 = Pretty good recall, more than a couple of words may be incorrect, but the gist of the sentence is intact. 2 = Some gist is present but it is not very close; not as good as a 3 1 = Barely recognizable

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did not change (for example, comin around the mountain and coming around the mountain were considered to be equivalent). For the lowest three ratings, if words were missing or out of place in a response, judges were instructed to decide how important the incorrect words were and to judge memory accordingly. After each judge rated the fabricated responses individually using the 15 scale, the rating for each item was discussed, and judges agreed on the rating for each response. Judges did not discuss scores for the real participant responses. Each judge rated each participants response for both punch line memory tasks. Memory ratings were averaged across the three judges. When any judge left a response rating box blank, that response was omitted from analysis. Intraclass correlation (a measure of judge agreement on a set of scores) for the three judges was calculated using the method explained by Howell (2001). Intraclass correlation was .86 for the free recall task, and .85 for the cued recall task. Generally, if participants recalled a punch line, they did so with near verbatim accuracy. In the free recall task, the memory rating for original punch lines (M = 4.15, SD = 1.07) was not different from the memory rating for rewritten punch lines (M = 4.13, SD = .87), t (379) = .197, p = .844, Cohens d = 0.02. In the cued recall task, memory ratings for original punch lines (M = 4.23, SD = .98) were not better than for rewritten ones (M = 4.20, SD = .87), t (576) = .291, p = .771, Cohens d = 0.03. Results As in Experiment 1, participants found the original jokes to be more humorous (M = 2.18, SD = 0.58) than rewritten items (M = 1.18, SD = 0.27), t (120) = 19.20, p < .001, Cohens d = 2.35. Participants again rated the rst ten items presented as funnier (M = 1.71, SD = 0.39) than the last ten items (M = 1.55, SD = 0.40), t (120) = 6.63, p < .001, Cohens d = 0.41. Participants had better recall for names in original jokes (M = 3.36, SD = 1.74) than in rewritten items (M = 1.73, SD = 1.23), t (120) = 9.27, p < .001, Cohens d = 1.10. Participants also had better recognition memory for names in original jokes (M = 11.79, SD = 2.02) than names in rewritten items (M = 10.41, SD = 2.26), t (120) = 6.03, p < .001, Cohens d = 0.64. Signal detection and d scores indicated good discrimination between old and new names in the name recognition task, both for names associated with a pun (M = 1.73, SD = .84) and for names from rewritten punch lines (M = 1.41, SD = .73). Again, participants had better d scores for names associated with a pun compared to names in rewritten items, t (120) = 4.47, p < .001, Cohens d = 0.41. Hit rate for names from original jokes was M = 11.79, with a false alarm rate for original joke name counterparts of M = 3.46. Hit rate for names from rewritten items was M = 10.41, with a false alarm for rewritten item name counterparts of M = 3.40. These recall and recognition results replicate the results of Experiment 1, showing a consistent humor effect on memory.

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To obtain a score for the total number of recalled punch lines, a response was counted if it was given a memory rating of at least 1 by the judges, which meant the response was at least barely recognizable as a punch line from the slideshow (as previously noted, most were scored as a 4 or 5). In the free recall task for punch lines, participants were more likely to recall an original punch line (M = 2.17, SD = 1.46) than a rewritten punch line (M = 0.84, SD = 1.05), t (120) = 10.13, p < .001, Cohens d = 1.06. In the cued recall task, participants also recalled more original punch lines (M = 4.28, SD = 2.55) than rewritten (M = 0.69, SD = 1.15), t (120) = 16.92, p < .001, Cohens d = 1.94. These results demonstrate participants ability to recall not just names from original jokes but the punch lines as well. When the name from the item was available as a cue, memory for original punch lines increased. Providing the name for rewritten punch lines did not increase recall. The name, when strongly associated with the rest of the punch line by a pun, acted as a memory constraint for the reconstruction of the punch line.

Discussion As in Experiment 1, we found that even the limited humor of a pun improved memory. Participants rated the original jokes as funnier than the rewritten ones and had better recall and recognition for names from original items. We also found that the humor effect extended beyond memory for names to entire punch lines. Memory quality was rated as quite high for both original and rewritten punch lines. The high ratings and the lack of difference in ratings for original and rewritten punch lines may be explained by the short punch lines participants were required to recall. Punch line length varied, but the average length was 4.65 words, including the name used in the punch line. When a participant must recall only ve words, verbatim recall becomes an easier task. This may also reect the task demands such that people only write a punch line if they can accurately reconstruct it, as Hyman and Rubin (1990) found in memory for songs. Although there was no difference in the average accuracy score for pun and rewritten items, we found that puns resulted in substantially better recall for the entire punch line than did rewritten items. Participants recalled a greater number of original punch lines in both the free recall and the cued recall conditions. When given the names as a cue, an increase was seen in the number of remembered original punch lines, but not in the number of rewritten punch lines. The constraint provided by the pun is likely the reason for the increase in remembered original punch lines: Given the core of the pun (the name), participants were able to reconstruct the rest of the sentence. This pattern of results indicates that the pun name acted as a strong constraint and is an effective memory cue for these punch lines.

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EXPERIMENT 4 In Experiment 4, we investigated the role of humor incongruity as a memory aid in its form as distinctiveness. Kintsch and Bates (1977) found that when humorous material was relatively rare in an academic lecture, and thus incongruous, the humorous items were well recalled. In our studies using knock-knock jokes, participants may have come to expect puns because half of the items appeared in their original joke form. In this experiment, we varied the proportion of items that were puns and those that were rewritten. Some participants viewed presentations that were based on the rst three experimentsthat is, half were puns, and half were rewritten items. Other participants saw presentations that were mostly non-humorous rewritten items (80% non-puns), making the puns incongruous and distinctive. Others saw presentations that were mostly puns (80% puns), making the non-pun rewritten items incongruous and thus distinctive. Method Participants Participants were 83 introductory psychology students at Western Washington University (18 males and 65 females). Participants volunteered for a choice of studies as a partial fulllment of a class requirement. Age ranged from 18 years to 48 years (M = 19.98 years, SD = 5.33). Materials and Procedure Participants received a packet that included a consent form, a demographics page asking for age and gender, a page for rating joke funniness, a math distracter task, and a blank page. A separate page for the recognition task was also used. The slideshows used in this experiment were similar in form to the previously used slideshows, using the same 30 names and the same original and rewritten forms of the items. However, to provide distinctiveness for the names in original or rewritten items, two sets of the slideshows used in this experiment were written to have an imbalance in original or rewritten jokes. In the balanced condition, the slideshows were 6 of the original rotations from Experiment 1, all with 15 original and 15 rewritten non-pun items. In the 80% puns condition, the slideshows had 24 original jokes and 6 rewritten items. This made the non-pun items incongruous and distinctive. In the 80% non-pun condition, the slideshows had 6 original jokes and 24 rewritten items. In this condition, the puns were distinctive. In both of the unbalanced conditions, we used six different slideshow rotations. In constructing the random orders used, several constraints were placed on the unevenly balanced slideshows to preserve the distinctiveness of the minority type items. These slideshows started with three of the majority item type in succession.

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Each minority item type item was presented with at least two of the majority type items on either side. Slideshows ended with two or more of the majority type items. Individuals participated in groups of 5 or fewer people. A total of 29 viewed the balanced slideshows, 28 participants viewed the 80% puns slideshows, and 26 viewed the 80% non-puns slideshows. The procedure was nearly identical to Experiment 1. Participants were given packets and instructions, viewed the slideshow and rated humor, and then completed the distracter task and the memory tasks. Results

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We used 3 2 mixed-model ANOVAs to investigate the effects of incongruity (80% puns, balanced, 20% puns) and item type (pun, non-pun) on both free recall and recognition of the names. Follow-up comparisons were Tukeys HSD at the .05 level. In this experiment, since the number of pun and non-pun items was not consistent, we tested the proportion of items that participants remembered. For free recall, we found a main effect of incongruity level (F (2, 80) = 3.284, MSE = 0.018, p = .043, eta2 = .076), a main effect of item type (F (1, 80) = 35.676, MSE = 0.016, p < .001, eta2 = .308), and an interaction (F (2, 80) = 9.650, MSE = 0.016, p < .001, eta2 = .194). Figure 1 shows the mean proportion of pun and non-pun items recalled in each of the incongruity levels. Overall, participants were more likely to recall the pun than the non-pun items. This humor effect was moderated by the interaction. In the 80% puns condition, the difference between the recall of pun and non-pun items was not signicant. In the balanced and the 20% puns conditions, participants were more likely to recall pun than non-pun items. We also found that puns were more likely to be recalled in the 20% puns condition than in either the 80% puns or the balanced

Free recall
0.45 0.4 0.35 0.3 0.25 0.2 0.15 0.1 0.05 0 80% puns Balanced 20% puns

Recall proportion

Puns Non-puns

Incongruity level
FIGURE 1. Free recall of puns and non-puns for each level of incongruity (error bars are 95% condence intervals).

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Recognition

Recognition proportion

0.95 0.9 0.85 0.8 0.75 0.7 0.65 0.6 0.55 0.5 80% puns Balanced 20% puns Puns Non-puns

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Incongruity level
FIGURE 2. Recongition of puns and non-puns for each level of incongruity (error bars are 95% condence intervals).

conditions. There were no signicant differences in the recall of the non-pun items in the different incongruity conditions. In essence, the distinctiveness form of incongruity contributed to the memory of puns. With respect to recognition, we found no main effect of incongruity level (F (2, 80) = 0.322, MSE = 0.033, p = .725, eta2 = .008), a main effect of item type (F (1, 80) = 44.472, MSE = 0.015, p < .001, eta2 = .357), and an interaction (F (2, 80) = 4.066, MSE = 0.015, p = .015, eta2 = .092). Figure 2 shows the mean proportion of pun and non-pun items recognized in each incongruity level. Similar to free recall, participants were more likely to recognize pun than non-pun items, and this humor effect was again moderated by the interaction with incongruity level. In the 80% pun condition, there was not a signicant difference between pun and non-pun items, whereas in the balanced and 20% pun conditions, participants were more likely to recognize puns than non-puns. There were no signicant effects of incongruity for either the pun or non-pun items. Discussion In Experiment 4, we again replicated the effect of humor on memory. We also found that the humor effect was accentuated by incongruitythat is, memory was enhanced when pun items were infrequent. When the pun items are infrequent, participants were more likely to remember the pun than the non-pun items as reected in both the free recall and recognition ndings. When the pun items were the majority of the items presented, they were no more likely to be remembered than the non-pun items. Distinctive items are better remembered and, as Kintsch and Bates (1977) suggested, the incongruity of humorous items in many contexts contributes to their recall. Incongruity does not completely explain the humor effect. When

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humorous and non-humorous items were balanced, participants were more likely to remember the humorous items. In addition, when non-humorous items were relatively rare, participants did not remember more of those items. Instead, incongruous non-puns were as likely to be remembered as puns. Incongruity contributes to the effect of humor on memory, but does not completely explain the effect. Conclusion Based on these four experiments, we argue that constraints and incongruity contribute to the effect of humor on memory. Rubin (1995) suggested that multiple constraints available in some materials, such as songs and poems, limit reconstruction and thus aid memory. For songs, the meaning, rhythm, and rhyme patterns tightly constrain the words that can t any line, limiting the reconstruction of the song and making accurate recall more likely (Hyman & Rubin, 1990). In puns, the nal line is likewise constrained. In contrast to the non-pun rewritten items, the puns are constrained by the dual meanings contained in the sound pattern. These constraints clearly aided in the reconstruction of the nal lines in Experiment 3. When participants were provided with the names, they constructed the pun versions more often than the non-pun versions. Much like memory for songs (Hyman & Rubin, 1990), when participants retrieved the lines, they did so with a high level of accuracy. The constraint aided retrieval and accurate reconstruction. In Experiment 4, we found evidence that incongruity plays a causal role in how humor affects memory. The form of incongruity we investigated is how distinctive the item appeared in the set of items. When humorous items were rare, participants were substantially more likely to remember the puns than the non-pun items. In contrast, when humorous items were the majority of the studied items, the puns were not more likely to be remembered than non-pun items. This is consistent with Kintsch and Bates (1977) nding that those notoriously rare humorous statements in a college lecture were more likely to be recalled. In general, distinctive items are more easily remembered (Pillsbury & Raush, 1943; Wallace, 1965). Incongruity, in this distinctiveness sense, does not completely drive the memory effects of humor. When humor and pun items were balanced, humorous items were still more likely to be recalled in all our experiments. Using the ndings of these experiments, we can also argue that certain proposed causal mechanisms may not underlie the memory effects of humor. Although rehearsal of humorous material has been suggested as the underlying cause of memory effects, we found this is clearly not the case for puns. In Experiment 2, participants reported that they expended more effort and rehearsal on the non-pun rewritten items than the original knock-knock jokes. Most likely, this reected an effort to nd the non-existent joke. Nonetheless, participants had better memory for items on which they spent less time and effortthat is, the puns. Schmidt and Williams (2001) also argued that rehearsal is unlikely to be the causal mechanism for humor effects.

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As with other studies, using simple humorous material, we suspect that emotional mechanisms do not account for the humor effects in memory for knockknock jokes. Because participants knew they were in a study concerning jokes, it is unlikely they were surprised by the punch lines of the jokes. Further, the participants generally rated the knock-knock jokes as only slightly funny, which implies they were not particularly aroused by the puns we presented. Of course, surprise and arousal may contribute to the memory effects of humor in some contexts. If humor creates surprise in an unexpected context (Schmidt & Williams, 2001) or creates an optimal level of arousal (Derks et al., 1998; Lippman & Tragesser, 2005; Maher & Van Griffen, 1988), then emotion may add to other factors that make humor an effective memory aid. An additional limitation of our method is that participants provided both free recall and recognition data in our memory experiments. The free recall task was always rst and may have biased performance on the recognition task by serving as an additional rehearsal for some items. Future research could address this by including conditions in which people only perform recognition tasks. In our research and other studies using simple forms of humor, mirthproduction is not a prerequisite for the memory effects. Instead, any humor and joke structure can serve as an effective constraint on memory. Other explanations for humor effects on memory, such as surprise and arousal, require humorous material to be truly funny. In our experiments, the pun in the knock-knock jokes provides a constraint on the information in the punch line, limiting the participants choice of specic pun words. The completed pun provides a context and a connection to the other words in the punch line, allowing for accurate reconstruction of the entire line. For knock-knock jokes, the form of the joke may be more important than any genuine humor for constraining the information and aiding memory. While not all humor is as tightly constrained as a knock-knock joke, most humorous material contains some constraints that limit memory alternatives. Any attempts to improve memory by using humor should integrate the humor as closely as possible within the information to be remembered, so that memory of the humor will constrain reconstruction of the relevant information. Integrating humor with other information increases comprehension and positive affect toward an advertisement (Gelb & Pickett, 1983; Madden & Weinberger, 1982; Weinberger & Gulas, 1992). We suggest that the integration will improve memory for that material as well.
AUTHOR NOTES Hannah Summerfelt earned her masters in psychology and MBA at Western Washington University. She is currently a dental student at Midwestern University. Louis Lippman is an emeritus professor in the Psychology Department at Western Washington University. He earned his PhD from Michigan State University. Since his retirement, he is blissfully engaged in musical activities. Ira E. Hyman Jr. is a professor in the psychology department at Western Washington University. He received his PhD from Emory University.

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Original manuscript received February 15, 2010 Final version accepted April 26, 2010