Responses to incomprehensible humor

•Explicit expressions of non-understanding were the most common verbal response.•Women favored more direct strategies for indicating their lack of comprehension than did men.•Direct strategies tended to be used more with strangers and intimates than with acquaintances.•No significant differences in response strategies were found with respect to age.

Humor may fail for many reasons and the ways in which this happens are just beginning to be explored. Bell, 2009a and Bell, 2009b used an unfunny joke to elicit responses in order to describe reactions that an attempt at humor receives when the joke is not appreciated. The present paper adopts those methods to explore responses to a joke that failed because it was not understood by the recipient. A total of 278 responses were elicited using a joke that was impossible for most hearers to comprehend without explanation. The most common reactions included non-verbal responses, explicit expressions of non-understanding (e.g. “I don’t get it”), laughter, silence, and repetition of the punch line. Significant differences were found in examining the responses by the sociolinguistic variables of gender and social relationship, but not age.