The paper "Semantic Mechanisms of Humor" by Victor Raskin explores the linguistic and extra-linguistic context of humor through a semantic lens. It argues that recent developments in semantic and pragmatic theory, such as interpretive and generative semantics, presuppositional analysis, truth-conditional and possible-world semantics, speech act theory, and implicatures, have significantly advanced the study of humor. The author proposes a script-oriented semantic theory, where the lexicon entries for sentence constituents are linked to a finite repertoire of scripts representing cognitive structures stored in the mind of native speakers. These scripts are motivated by grammaticality, meaningfulness, and appropriateness, and they describe standard routines and processes in the extra-linguistic world. The paper aims to develop a formal semantic analysis to identify the necessary and sufficient conditions for a text to be humorous. It suggests that humor arises from the partial or complete overlap of two or more scripts that are compatible with the joke-carrying text. The author provides examples of jokes analyzed in terms of overlapping scripts, including party jokes, English limericks, and Russian chastushkas. The paper also discusses the limitations of previous attempts to explain humor, such as Freud's focus on lexical ambiguity, and highlights the potential of the proposed script-oriented theory to provide a more comprehensive understanding of humor. The first part of the paper covers the nature of humor and its philosophical, psychological, and physiological aspects, while the second part introduces and applies the script-oriented semantic theory to humor. The author notes that while the theory may not fully capture all aspects of humor, it offers a structured approach to understanding the linguistic mechanisms underlying verbal humor.The paper "Semantic Mechanisms of Humor" by Victor Raskin explores the linguistic and extra-linguistic context of humor through a semantic lens. It argues that recent developments in semantic and pragmatic theory, such as interpretive and generative semantics, presuppositional analysis, truth-conditional and possible-world semantics, speech act theory, and implicatures, have significantly advanced the study of humor. The author proposes a script-oriented semantic theory, where the lexicon entries for sentence constituents are linked to a finite repertoire of scripts representing cognitive structures stored in the mind of native speakers. These scripts are motivated by grammaticality, meaningfulness, and appropriateness, and they describe standard routines and processes in the extra-linguistic world. The paper aims to develop a formal semantic analysis to identify the necessary and sufficient conditions for a text to be humorous. It suggests that humor arises from the partial or complete overlap of two or more scripts that are compatible with the joke-carrying text. The author provides examples of jokes analyzed in terms of overlapping scripts, including party jokes, English limericks, and Russian chastushkas. The paper also discusses the limitations of previous attempts to explain humor, such as Freud's focus on lexical ambiguity, and highlights the potential of the proposed script-oriented theory to provide a more comprehensive understanding of humor. The first part of the paper covers the nature of humor and its philosophical, psychological, and physiological aspects, while the second part introduces and applies the script-oriented semantic theory to humor. The author notes that while the theory may not fully capture all aspects of humor, it offers a structured approach to understanding the linguistic mechanisms underlying verbal humor.