Various studies show a link between irony comprehension and specific Theory of Mind (ToM) skills in Schizophrenic patients, who experience difficulty in irony processing, which has been related to their faulty mentalization skills. This study explores the neural correlates of irony grasp in patients, as an indicator of ToM ability, and assesses how surface cues (linguistic help) influence irony comprehension. Patients and control subjects are submitted to event-related functional MRI scanning when executing three tasks: (1) irony, (2) irony with linguistic help and (3) control tasks. Findings demonstrate that mentalizing skills are pivotal for a mature pragmatic competence, and that linguistic surface cues raise comprehension of implicit content.