Humor is divided in cognitive and affective elements (e.e. Moran et al, 2004; Coulson et al, 2001). The cognitive elements create disparities between the punch line and prior experience. Coherence is recovered by means of a surprising solution. The affective element (humor appreciation) is triggered by this surprising solution.
In the present case, a disparity is created by announcing that the concert will run into problems (P2) , and showing that these problems will be created by a soccer fan (P3). The surprise is having a soccer fan in a concer, because this will create disparities between the events of the actual concert and knowledge about how people behaves in this type of event.
Cognitive elements are those involved into language analysis as described in Listening.
The affective element is associated with the right hemisphere activity registered by FM3 in P3. This is in accordance with the literature (Coulson et al, 2001, 2005; Goel et al 2000; Moran et al, 2004 and Shami et al 1999) showing that the left hemisphere (FM1, FM2 and FM3 in P2 and FM1 and FM2 in P3) has a predominant hole is responsible for integrating informaton into a coherent manner to understand the joke, whereas the right hemisphere (FM3 in P3) is responsible for emotional processing associated with the surprise element.
The same pattern described here was observed for the 3 hillarious scenes composing the entire text the Concert .
Bibliography:
Coulson et al Brain and Language 2005/
Goel et al Nature Neuroscie. 2001/4:237-238
Moran et al NeuroImage 2004/21:1055-1060
Shami et al Brain 1999/122:657-666
Wild et al Brain 2003/126:2121-2138