What happens in the brain when you get a joke and laugh? · Grey Matter

Getting the joke is detecting an incongruity and resolving it, and imaging links that step to the temporo-occipital-parietal junction and the temporal lobe, with the prefrontal cortex helping to reinterpret the setup.

What happens in the brain when you get a joke and laugh?

Getting the joke is detecting an incongruity and resolving it, and imaging links that step to the temporo-occipital-parietal junction and the temporal lobe, with the prefrontal cortex helping to reinterpret the setup. Enjoying it engages the reward network: the amygdala, the ventral striatum with the nucleus accumbens, and the midbrain dopamine regions. Laughter itself is a motor act driven partly from the brainstem and the motor areas, which is why it can be hard to suppress once it starts.