Humor Effect

The humor effect is the tendency for humorous material to be remembered more accurately, and at higher rates, than comparable non-humorous material, an effect that has been demonstrated using humorous sentences, cartoons, photographs with humorous captions, and other formats, and that appears regardless of whether recall is tested through free recall or through cued recall. Researchers have tested several competing explanations for why the effect occurs, including the idea that humor draws additional elaborative processing, that resolving the incongruity in a joke requires extra cognitive effort that strengthens the resulting memory trace, and that humor simply produces greater emotional arousal that enhances memory the way other high-arousal, high-relevance experiences do; studies manipulating these factors separately have found that a person's own subjective rating of how funny an item is remains the strongest predictor of whether they later remember it, even after accounting for the amount of semantic elaboration and incongruity resolution involved. Research has also found that the memory benefit of humor is not confined only to the humorous item itself, but can extend to the surrounding context in which it appeared, consistent with the way other highly arousing and positively valenced experiences tend to strengthen associative memory more broadly, and the effect has been observed in both people in a neutral mood and people in a dysphoric mood, suggesting it operates fairly robustly across different emotional states.