Humorous texts : a semantic and pragmatic analysis This book presents a theory of long humorous texts based on a revision and an upgrade of the General Theory of Verbal Humour (GTVH) a decade after its first proposal. The theory is informed by current research in psycholinguistics and cognitive science. It is predicated on the fact that there are humorous mechanisms in long texts that have no counterpart in jokes. The book includes a number of case studies among them Oscar Wildes Lord Arthur Saviles Crime and Allais story Han Rybeck. A ground breaking discussion of the quantitative distribution of humor in select texts is presented.