[adamauckland]

There's entire studies on it, I saw a lecture by some English professor who explained how the brain isn't fast enough to parse words in real time, so runs multiple predictions of what the sentence will be in parallel and at the end jettisons the wrong ones and goes with the correct one.

From this, we get comedy. A funny statement is one that ends in an unpredictable manner and surprises the listener brain because it doesn't have the meaning of that one already calculated, and hence why it can take a while to "get the joke"