Comic perception and incongruent causal events: the role of paradoxical animacy.

We assumed that a disproportion between cause and effect in the launching paradigm is a favourable condition to perceive an event as comical. However, we hypothesized that incongruous events become funnier when they elicit also a paradoxical impression of animacy: ie the impression that moving squares behave as animate agents. Results show that when observers described an event in psychological terms, they rated both animacy and comic higher, while if the same event was perceived as mechanical, they rated both animacy and comic lower.