The psychophysics of comic: Effects of incongruity in causality and animacy

•We studied the emergence of comic effects in the visual perception of casual events.•The role of incongruity was tested with psychophysical methods.•The comic effect of casual incongruity requires the perception of animacy.•Speed, trajectory and temporal cues to animacy all can trigger a comic impression.•In causal events animal-like paths are deemed more amusing than mechanical ones.

According to several theories of humour (see Berger, 2012; Martin, 2007), incongruity – i.e., the presence of two incompatible meanings in the same situation – is a crucial condition for an event being evaluated as comical. The aim of this research was to test with psychophysical methods the role of incongruity in visual perception by manipulating the causal paradigm (Michotte, 1946/1963) to get a comic effect. We ran three experiments. In Experiment 1, we tested the role of speed ratio between the first and the second movement, and the effect of animacy cues (i.e. frog-like and jumping-like trajectories) in the second movement; in Experiment 2, we manipulated the temporal delay between the movements to explore the relationship between perceptual causal contingencies and comic impressions; in Experiment 3, we compared the strength of the comic impressions arising from incongruent trajectories based on animacy cues with those arising from incongruent trajectories not based on animacy cues (bouncing and rotating) in the second part of the causal event. General findings showed that the paradoxical juxtaposition of a living behaviour in the perceptual causal paradigm is a powerful factor in eliciting comic appreciations, coherently with the Bergsonian perspective in particular (Bergson, 2003), and with incongruity theories in general.