Abstract

A great deal of the humor that we encounter is narrative in form. This is obviously the case with many, if not most, jokes. But humor also occurs in more expanded narrative frameworks, including plays, novels, films, short stories, TV programs, comic books, and so forth. The purpose of this paper is to explore the question of whether there are any plot structures—of magnitudes greater than that of the joke—that might be thought of as comic in virtue of their narrative form.