A greater comprehension of conversational humour can be attained by conducting conversational humour inquiry from a novel methodological 'complexity theory' perspective. Complexity theory fosters a focus on change by regarding how the interacting parts of an intricate system occasion the system's collective conduct. It permits to ask and answer questions like: how do specific jokes, puns or humorous lexemes arise in a given discourse community? How do their uses and meanings evolve? The value of a complexity approach to conversation humour is shown by applying it to 235 instances of the lemma rolo*, in about 680,000 words of online data.