On incongruities and logical inconsistencies in humor: The delicate balance

Given the virtually universal observation that some form of incongruity in the story line of a joke is an essential condition for verbal (or written) humor, it remains to ask how the contradictory logic is treated by the hearer in order to he transformed into humor. Using foundations from both the semantic and pragmatic analyses of linguistics, it is demonstrated that the hearer (or the reader) must sometimes use inference to get the joke at all, and must sometimes inhibit any rational thought to avoid killing the joke entirely. A series of examples are offered to show the degree of fine-tuned discrimination that is used either to exploit or shut off all critical reasoning, depending on the demands of the joke in combination with the listener's general knowledge external to the script.