发现幽默的笑点时间安排比内容反差更重要,关键在停顿时机。
Timing is Everything: Temporal Scaffolding of Semantic Surprise in Humor
- 提出双预测违背框架,分析内容与时间如何协同制造笑点。
- 828段相声数据表明,关键时刻的反差和停顿长度决定观众反应。
- 适合研究语言认知、喜剧创作或人机幽默生成的人参考。
幽默是人类认知中对预期违背及其化解产生的愉悦感,体现大脑动态预测能力。经典理论强调语义不合是笑点核心,却忽视时间节奏——尽管喜剧演员普遍认为‘时机就是一切’。我们提出双预测违背(DPV)框架,探究内容与时间的交互作用。基于828段专业中文单口相声分析,发现时间特征对观众喜爱度的预测力远超语义反差。具体而言,高潮处的语义违背比平均反差水平更关键,且高意外性笑点前的停顿系统性延长,这种策略性配合区分了成功与失败表演。结果表明,幽默本质上是时间结构支撑的,内容与时间以战略协作方式共同作用。该框架连接幽默理论与预测加工,揭示时间结构在自然语言幽默理解中的核心地位,对语言处理中多尺度预测整合具有启示意义。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Humor is a fundamental cognitive phenomenon in which humans derive pleasure from the expectation violations and their resolution, exemplifying the brain's dynamic capacity for predictive processing. Classical humor theories emphasize semantic incongruity as the primary driver of amusement, yet overlook temporal dynamics despite comedians' intuition that "timing is everything." The extent to which temporal structure contributes to humor appreciation and how it interacts with semantic content remains poorly understood. Here, we propose the Dual Prediction Violation (DPV) framework to capture the interplay between content and timing. By analyzing 828 professional Chinese stand-up performances, we show that temporal features substantially outweigh semantic incongruity in predicting audience appreciation. Specifically, we find that peak semantic violations matter more than average incongruity levels, and pauses systematically lengthen before high-surprise punchlines--a strategic coupling that distinguishes successful from unsuccessful performances. These findings reframe humor as temporally scaffolded, where timing and semantic content operate in strategic coordination rather than independently. Our DPV framework bridges humor theory with predictive processing, demonstrating that temporal structure plays a central role in naturalistic humor appreciation with implications for understanding multi-scale prediction integration in linguistic processing.
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