Grammar Against Humanity: How Does Grammatical Incongruity Affect Perceptions of Humour?

Incongruity theory is one of the reigning theories of humour, explaining why we find jokes ‘funny’ — its argument is that humour comes from the unexpected. Prior linguistic studies of humour focus on semantic incongruity, that is when the meaning of the ‘punchline’ is unexpected from the ‘set up’ of the joke (as is the case with puns, irony, and double entendre joke-constructions). However, this prior research does not explore other kinds of incongruity such as grammatical incongruity. Memes are a great contemporary example of grammatical incongruity in humour such as Jeremy Clarkson (The Grand Tour, 2022) exclaiming ‘A egg!’ The question is raised, does the comedy come from his untraditional use of the consonant-predicating indefinite article a rather than the vowel predicating an, or the unexpected response? This project explores the relevance of grammatical incongruity for humour perceptions. Specifically, it seeks to understand if grammatical incongruity can improve, negate, or create a barrier to perceptions of humour in fill-in-the-blank joke constructions. To achieve this, a digital questionnaire based on the popular card game Cards Against Humanity is used to assess participants perceptions of grammatically incongruous joke-constructions and determines through quantitative and qualitative analysis that without semantic resolution it negates but with semantic resolution it can improve perceptions of humour.