Representing, Detecting, and Translating Humour in the Brain

Humour has been deemed a special language competency, or more extremely, humour has been seen as a form of mastery over a given language, as well as the culture, norms, and themes associated with the people speaking this language. This chapter provides an overview of fundamental issues concerning humour and a review of the state of the art literature from an interdisciplinary perspective. It focuses on issues of the humour and language, as well as the translation of humour from one language to another. The chapter elaborates on the processing of humour in the brain, presents a review on the currently existing studies, and briefly elaborates on humour and language learning. It differentiates between humour processing as a cognitive task, amusement as the emotional response to humour, and the motor/behavioural reactions (smiling or laughter). The chapter presents a conclusion on the reviewed studies and offers hypotheses on humour and the multilingual brain.