Creativity, Humour, and Cognition

This paper explores some aspects of the scientific study of creativity by focusing on intentionalattempts to create instances of linguistic humour. We argue that this sort of creativity canbe accounted for within an influential cognitive approach but that said framework is not arecipe for producing novel instances of humour and may even preclude them. We start byidentifying three great puzzles that arise when trying to pin down the core traits of creativity,and some of the ways taken by Cognitive Studies in this quest. We then consider what we call‘creative humour’, which exhibits the core features of the aforesaid creativity. We then explorehow a key cognitive approach to human communication can account for creative humour.We end by drawing lessons and highlighting limitations to cognitive approaches to creativity.