Conversational humor as an emergent property of context

In this position paper, we suggest that unplanned conversational humor should be considered an emergent property of context, defined as the dynamic mental representation of the situation in which the interactants find themselves, and that it is soft assembled in many cases, rather than negotiated, that is, there is no assumption of cooperation or even coordination among the interactants. Conversational humor may be negotiated or jointly constructed, as commonly assumed in the literature, but it may also be an interactional contingency, that is, an unpredictable event that needs to be accommodated, rather than coordinated.