In this inquiry, participants' eye movements were recorded while they read short texts falling into four categories: jokes, texts that made a revision of the situation model necessary without being funny (revision texts), and two types of control texts. Jokes were read faster and provoked less regressive eye movements than the other text categories. Women were more sensitive to revision and inference requests of nonhumorous texts than men, and this was especially the case when the instructions demanded a meta-linguistic assessment. In contrast to the predictions of the two-stage model of pragmatics, humor appreciation eased text comprehension, and this effect was stronger for men than for women.