Free Ha! by Scott Weems

what he calls the General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH), which explains how jokes are actually just different ways of manipulating scripts. To understand what that means, we need to take a closer look at Figure 2.3 and see how it maps onto the joke format we’re more familiar with.
    Let’s start by taking a close look at the words. Each word reflects a different script, which is a chunk of information describing some object, action, or belief. Scripts are different for everybody, and there are no rules for what must be contained in a person’s script. For me, the script for doctor includes the fact that he or she sees patients, prescribes medicine, and probably plays golf. Depending on your own exposure to specialists such as pediatricians or psychiatrists, your script might include other expectations such as lollipops and offices with couches. Babies are born without scripts. Scripts must be learned.
    Scientists use scripts to study humor because they allow for systematic analysis, as we see in Figure 2.3. Note that the left side of the figure represents all the scripts that are activated by the initial interpretation of the joke. We initially think the patient is going to the doctor to seek a cure. (The circular “nodes” represent scripts, and the lines represent meaningful connections between them.) Then, when the doctor’s wife invites him inside, we see that several scripts have been falsely activated. The patient is not sick. He’s not seeking a doctor either, he’s soliciting his lover. From the figure, you see that the common element between doctor and patient is cure. The corresponding link between lover and partner is quite different.
    The idea of scripts is an old one, rooted in almost fifty years of psychological research. “Scripts were really meant to be an umbrella term for all the knowledge humans have to describe their world,” says Attardo. “When Victor [Victor Raskin, original developer of Script Theory] introduced the idea, he intended it to be general. In the 1970s, there was a proliferation of research on things like schema, frames, schemata—all slightly different ways of describing how humans organize information. Some were defined more formally or operationally. But they were all trying to do the same thing. They were trying to say how people manipulate knowledge about their world.”
    All of this analysis may seem rather technical for a sub-par joke, but it does illustrate some important requirements for humor. First, in order to succeed, a joke must activate multiple scripts. Second, those scripts must oppose each other—and the greater the opposition, the funnier the joke. The key opposition here is between cure and having sex. Being treated for asthma or tuberculosis is about as different from having an afternoon tryst as you can get.
    Another benefit of thinking about humor in terms of scripts is that it allows for certain incongruities to be highlighted, and others ignored. Consider the following joke to see what I mean:
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  A bear walks into a bar and approaches the bartender. “A martini . . . dry.”
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  The bartender asks: “What’s with the pause?”
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  “I don’t know,” the bear replies. “I was born with them.”
    This joke relies on a pun, which is essentially a conflict between scripts based on phonological ambiguity, but that’s not the point. The point is—what’s a bear walking into a bar for? Why didn’t the bartender run for his life? And how could a bear possibly hold a martini glass, anyway? We ignore these incongruities because we quickly recognize they aren’t part of the joke. The key script opposition is between the words pause and paws, which has nothing to do with the bear’s sudden ability to talk