A Dynamical Theory of Humor Magnitude

Humor varies widely in intensity across people, contexts, and repetitions of the same material, yet existing theories primarily focus on antecedent conditions under which humor may occur. These approaches specify when a stimulus is likely to be interpreted as humorous but offer no mechanism for explaining differences in magnitude. The Dynamical Comprehension and Elaboration Theory (DCET) addresses this gap by conceptualizing humor as a temporally extended process rather than a discrete outcome that determines only whether humor is present or absent. DCET proposes that humor requires two enabling conditions, paratelic framing and structural incongruity, that allow discrepant information to be treated as a target for exploratory processing. Once these conditions are in place, initial comprehension of the incongruous material begins, followed by recursive elaboration that unfolds through iterative cycles of retrieval, comparison, and reinterpretation; the duration of this elaboration determines humor magnitude. Dynamical elaboration cues (DECs), such as prosodic timing, performative gestures, or others’ laughter, modulate this time course by extending or truncating elaboration, while physiological arousal amplifies its experiential impact. This process-level framework unifies empirical phenomena that antecedent models cannot explain, including social amplification, timing failures, repetition effects, and motivational gating, as well as arousal-dependent modulation. Grounded in these temporal dynamics of humor elicitation, it generates concrete and empirically testable predictions about the conditions that sustain or truncate recursive elaboration.