Learning to Think Like a Cartoon Captionist: Incongruity-Resolution Supervision for Multimodal Humor Understanding
Authors: Hatice Merve Vural, Doga Kukul, Ege Erdem Ozlu, Demir Ekin Arikan, Bob Mankoff, Erkut Erdem, Aykut Erdem
Organizations: Koç University, Istanbul, Turkey · KUIS AI Center, Istanbul, Turkey · Air Mail and Cartoon Collections · Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey
Abstract
Humor is one of the few cognitive tasks where getting the reasoning right matters as much as getting the answer right. While recent work evaluates humor understanding on benchmarks such as the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest (NYCC), it largely treats it as black-box prediction, overlooking the structured reasoning processes underlying humor comprehension. We introduce IRS (Incongruity-Resolution Supervision), a framework that decomposes humor understanding into three components: Incongruity Modeling, which identifies mismatches in the visual scene; Resolution Modeling, which constructs coherent reinterpretations of these mismatches; and Preference Alignment, which evaluates candidate interpretations under human judgments. Grounded in incongruity-resolution theory and expert captionist practice, IRS supervises intermediate reasoning process through structured traces that make the path from visual perception to humorous interpretation explicit and learnable. Across 7B, 32B, and 72B models on NYCC, IRS improves performance across caption matching and ranking, with IRS-72B achieving the strongest model performance on ranking (76.10%), surpassing both non-expert human performance and all evaluated open- and closed-source multimodal baselines. Zero-shot transfer further shows that IRS learns generalizable reasoning patterns.
Multimodal humor in memes, cartoons, and comics remains difficult for AI systems because intended meaning depends on non-literal mechanisms, shared cultural knowledge, and communicative intent rather than literal scene description. This survey focuses on visual humor understanding in single-image and multi-panel artifacts, while treating humor generation as an emerging downstream frontier. We position the literature against prior humor, sarcasm, and general MLLM surveys and organize it using a capability-centric hierarchy spanning recognition, interpretation and reasoning, and generation. Under this lens, we synthesize benchmark design, evaluation protocols, and modeling paradigms, tracing the field's shift from task-specific fusion models to large-model approaches based on multimodal alignment, evidence-grounded reasoning, and controlled generation. We conclude by highlighting the main barriers to progress: shortcut-prone evaluation, limited cultural and narrative coverage, weak evidence grounding, and unresolved safety and ownership concerns.
Recent multimodal large language models have shown promising ability in generating humorous captions for images, yet they still lack stable control over explicit cultural context, making it difficult to jointly maintain image relevance, contextual appropriateness, and humor quality under a specified cultural background. To address this limitation, we introduce a new multimodal generation task, culture-aware humorous captioning, which requires a model to generate a humorous caption conditioned on both an input image and a target cultural context. Captions generated under different cultural contexts are not expected to share the same surface form, but should remain grounded in similar visual situations or humorous rationales.To support this task, we establish a six-dimensional evaluation framework covering image relevance, contextual fit, semantic richness, reasonableness, humor, and creativity. We further propose a staged alignment framework that first initializes the model with high-resource supervision under the Western cultural context, then performs multi-dimensional preference alignment via judge-based GRPO with a Degradation-aware Prototype Repulsion Constraint to mitigate reward hacking in open-ended generation, and finally adapts the model to the Eastern cultural context with a small amount of supervision. Experimental results show that our method achieves stronger overall performance under the proposed evaluation framework, with particularly large gains in contextual fit and a better balance between image relevance and humor under cultural constraints.
In most existing AI humor research, humor was treated as either "present" or "not present." We explore the concept of humor as a social interaction with context and explanations. During this project, we defined a humor reasoning data object and developed a way to prompt LLMs to generate an explanation of humor effective for general population. We iterated from an earlier prompt to an improved prompt, found that the later version reduced important errors, and then scaled generation to a large number of data objects which have the potential to enable data synthesis and data augmentation for AI humor research. Our main takeaway is that better prompting of an LLM improves humor explanation quality, especially by handling missing context, multi-modality, and transcript issues more carefully. These results establish a strong foundation for future work on AI understanding of humor as social behavior. All code and data are available at: https://github.com/anna-arnett/ai-humor/ .