Sentence examples for setup questions from inspiring English sources
In The World's Funnyman, as in every other show, they shout "Why?" or "What?" in answer to the setup questions, and join in with his catchphrase: "But that's my life!" Hamburger calls them "assholes" when they don't laugh, and hurls "candy" from his pockets at them when they do.
Setup questions followed by logical, congruous responses that were neither funny nor surprising served as a baseline control condition.
We specifically manipulated this stage by using incongruous, nonsensical responses to setup questions that are known to evoke a large N400m (Halgren et al., 2002; Helenius et al., 1998; Kutas & Van Petten, 1994).
Indeed, setup questions commonly prime the dominant meaning of the punch line but contain cues to the intended meaning as well (e.g., "What do you call a crazy spaceman?
Run Portable Firefox once and answer the setup questions.
This stage performs an initial analysis based on the associative relationships between the setup question and the punch line.
In contrast, funny punch lines evoke the smallest N400m during this initial lexical semantic stage, consistent with their primed "surface congruity" with the setup question.
Because humor appreciation relies on resolving ambiguities and establishing coherence with the preceding joke setup question, funny punch lines were used to probe the resolution/coherence stage.
This suggests that the reduced N400m to funny punch lines may be due to the "surface congruity" with the preceding setup question at this initial semantic and contextual processing stage, as discussed further below.
For instance, the setup question "During a thunderstorm at a concert, who is most likely to be struck by lightning?" primes the dominant meaning of the punch line "the conductor," resulting in an attenuated N400m.
We hypothesized that the activity subsequent to N400m, potentially analogous to the P600, would be largest to funny punch lines as their ambiguous meaning was resolved and integrated with the preceding setup question.
