Psychometric intelligence and verbal humor ability

Abstract

In an exploratory study of the relationship between psychometric intelligence and humor, cognitive tests of ‘verbal humor ability’ and traditional verbal tests were administered to three samples of examinees. The tests purporting to measure ‘humor information’ were not highly correlated with general verbal ability or verbal creativity, whereas scales developed to assess ‘humor reasoning’ correlated appreciably with the verbal measures. A joke-completion test of ‘joke knowledge’ was highly correlated with the humor information measures. We concluded that there was evidence for two broad facets of convergent humor performance, memory for humor and humor cognition, and that the latter was much more strongly associated with general verbal ability than was the former.