Use of Language in Humor and The Concept of Incongruence

Observations, ideas, and proposals that aim to have an insight into humor date back to ancient times, and those proposals that have been generally accepted in this particular field of study are commonly classified into three groups as cognitive, social, and psychoanalytical approaches. Each one of these approaches focuses on a different aspect of humor, and builds a theory around this particular aspect. It is fair to say that each one of these theories built this way explains one aspect of the truth about humor yet none of them provides an across-the-broard theory of humor in its extended sense. This paper aims to investigate into the nature of humor by focusing in on the concept of ‘incongruence’ / ‘conflict’ as understood within cognitive models and to discuss the ways that incongruence models analyze texts that contain verbally expressed humor