1 Zsuzsanna Schnell Department of Psychology University of Pécs, Hungary When the Penny Drops – in the Cognitive Dimension Summary: Humor is present in our everyday interactions and communicative settings. Just as non-literal expressions in general (e.g. metaphorical, idiomatic, or indirect constructions), humorous utterances also pose the question: how do listeners decipher the intended meaning of the utterance and cope with the apparent “mismatch” of competing meanings; how do they unwrap the relevant gist from the deceptive (non-literal) packaging and finally lend themselves to the humorous effect? Humor may be seen as a form of play, be it social or linguistic. It serves important social, emotional and cognitive functions (Martin, 2007). The nature of the language used for humor is strongly influenced by the particular social contexts in which it is used and the social purposes to which it is put (Bergen, Binsted, 2004). Furthermore, extralinguistic cognitive systems play an important role in processing humorous language. The interaction of social, linguistic and cognitive factors delegates humor understanding to a cognitive pragmatic level, in which intended meaning is deciphered relying on social-cognitive skills and through a dynamic meaning construction (Schnell, 2005, 2007; Komlósi, Schnell, 2008). The paper gives insight into the complex mechanisms that account for the humorous effect of the punch line, and provide a necessary background in the field, showing that the prevailing interpreting theories – centering on relief (Kant, 1790; Spencer, 1860), conflict-, (Coulson, 2001) and incongruity resolution (Schopenhauer, 1819) – are grounded in cognitive psychological models of humor, and stem from the basic philosophy of cognitive linguistics. In the paper I intend to reveal the mental processes responsible for the understanding of humor, and argue that the successful deciphering of intended (humorous) meaning in the case of non-compositional constructions in general and of humorous utterances in particular, greatly depends on complex processes of mentalization. Meaning construction is, therefore, portrayed as a complex mental process, where meaning is actively constructed; but contrarily to traditional approaches, not from sheer linguistic input, but through the consideration of contextual, situational cues. As we will see, therefore, social-cognitive constraints play a crucial role in the successful decoding of humorous texts and utterances. Humor and cognition The present paper portrays humor understanding in a cognitive linguistic paradigm. It aims to reveal and identify the cognitive mechanisms that are responsible for the understanding of humor. Some of these strategies are of linguistic nature, (semantic and syntactic mechanisms of processing ambiguities); some are more domain-general, playing important roles in human thinking and cognition. Therefore a holistic meaning construction is hypothesized to be