Funny you asked: Re-representation and the cognitive processes involved in creating humor

The cognitive process involved in real time re-representation was examined by looking at how experts and novices wrote humorous captions for photographs as they thought aloud. A cognitive framework developed to explain this task included three interrelated cognitive processes that comic writers and novices engaged in differently. First, comic writers made more detailed interpretations than novices did. Specifically, they described the plot of the photograph in greater detail than novices did. Second, experts were more likely than novices to create humor by mapping a structural relationship to make a humorous transformation of their initial interpretation of a photograph. Third, comic writers tended to activate a schema to write their captions while novices tended to construct their captions in a piecemeal manner. These results suggest that creating humor relies on a well-organized and structured knowledge base that enables a person to readily perceive the structure of a situation and activate an appropriate comic schema to create humor.