Timing is Everything: Temporal Scaffolding of Semantic Surprise in Humor

ArXi:2605.00143v1 Announce Type: new 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.