the essential link between humor and creativity

According to Arthur Koestler (in The Act of Creation), humor in all its various forms is rooted in mock confusions of two or more usually different components, which may then result in so-called bisociative acts. In one form or another, it is often delivered through bait-and-switch. The audience is “baited,” or led to believe that a particular train of thought is in play. And then, abruptly, as a result of the punch line, a disarming switch of attention occurs, and a momentary confusion erupts. The effect is a double awareness in which A is A, while, at the same time, A is also not-A.

In performing bait-and-switch routines, it is customary to feature a pair of comedians, one of whom, known as the straight man, is the person who sets up the pattern—the bait—for the audience. The second person ignites the laughter in the process of airing the punch line. In Abbott and Costello, Bud Abbott is the straight man, while Lou Costello makes the pretended confusions. In Burns and Allen, George Burns is the straight man, while his partner, Gracie Allen, is the sort-crosser. Sancho Panza is the straight man in Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote. In Mister Magoo cartoons, Magoo’s impoverished eyesight leads him to mistakenly think that A is not-A, while Waldo provides the conventional view. In the case of Sherlock Holmes, it is the insightful detective whose cleverness takes us by surprise, while Watson underscores the norm. more>>>

gestalt theory, attention, and problem-solving

Thinking Outside the Box (2022)

Zerubavel | perhapstheyshouldhavetrieditearlier

Event poster (©2016) Roy R. Behrens

In view of the many painful events and discussions that are currently on-going, were I asked to name a book that everyone (young and old) could benefit from reading, I would strongly recommend Rutgers sociologist Eviatar Zerubavel’s The Fine Line: Making Distinctions in Everyday Life (New York: The Free Press, 1991). This is one of its many powerful thoughts (p. 80)—

It is society that helps us carve discrete islands of meaning out of our experience. Only English speakers, for example, can “hear” the gaps between the separate words in “perhapstheyshouldhavetrieditearlier,” which everyone else hears as a single chain of sound. Along similar lines, while people who hear jazz for the first time can never understand why a seemingly continuous stretch of music is occasionally interrupted by bursts of applause, jazz connoisseurs can actually “hear” the purely mental divides separating piano, bass, or drum “solos” from mere “accompaniment.” Being a member of society entails “seeing” the world through special mental lenses. It is these lenses, which we acquire only through socialization, that allow us to perceive “things.” The proverbial Martian cannot see the mental partitions separating Catholics from Protestants, classical from popular music, or the funny from the crude. Like the contours of constellations, we “see” such fine lines only when we learn that we should expect them there. As real as they may feel to us, boundaries are mere figments of our minds. Only the “socialized” can see them…

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RELATED LINKS
Eviatar Zerbavel, Taken for Granted: The Remarkable Power of the Unremarkable
Eviatar Zerbavel, Hidden in Plain Sight: The Social Structure of Irrelevance
Roy R. Behrens, On Slicing the Cheese and Treating the Menu Like Stew: On Creativity and Categorization

Joseph Podlesnik's Phenomenal Photography

Photograph © Joseph Podlesnik 2019

An Arizona-based friend and artist Joseph Podlesnik recently sent me a visual metamorphosis, the stages in the development of chair design. I thought it was appropriate because Joe himself is a metamorphosis, albeit not one you should sit on.

This fall he is teaching an online course in photography for Cornell University, his graduate alma mater. When I first met him forty-plus years ago, he was an undergraduate in painting and drawing at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and admired for his skillfulness at drawing from life. His drawings were astonishing because they were so “true” to immediate sight, and yet they appeared to have happened effortlessly.

Here is a favorite self-portrait I’ve posted before. He does look squiggly in real life—but not that much.

Some years later, he began to make short films about his family, that relied on those same virtues of looseness entwined with precision. In recent years, he has evolved into photography. But not just photography, but Joe Podlesnik photographs.

A recent one (for which he received a prize in a nationwide competition) is shown above. But I am also reminded that in 2016, two years before my retirement, my students designed a series of posters, called Almost Seeing, about the photographs he was making then.

For more, see his website here.

The Man Who Mistook Someone's Hat For His

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Frank Swinnerton, Swinnerton: An Autobiography. Garden City NY: Doubleday, Doran and Company, 1936, p. 28-29 [recalling an incident at a London publishing firm where he worked]—

He [a co-worker named Martin, who was the company cashier] had a very large round head, upon which he wore a great dusty bowler hat; and one Saturday, when everybody but myself had gone home, I was dismayed to find that he had taken my hat and left this monster [his hat] behind. Despair grew when it dawned upon me that the hat came down to my chin. But at last I recollected that Martin was most likely to be found in a local pub, and set out in search of him as Cockney wives sometimes go on Saturday nights in search of their husbands, opening swing doors and quickly scanning the faces in the bar.

My search was brief. He was sitting on a tall stool in the center of the saloon bar of the Essex Serpent, in King Street. In his outstretched arms was a newspaper; a pipe was held firmly in his front teeth; and high upon his big white head, looking in its inadequacy like a thimble, was perched my little hat. I removed it firmly; and Martin was very annoyed, first with me for entering a pub at all, second with himself for having taken my hat, and finally again with me for knowing where he was to be found. Poor man, his life was a misery.

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Note We will add this to our ever expanding collection of stories about those who have mistaken someone else's hat (or other item of clothing) for their own. Go here, for example, for another hat confusion tale by British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, or here for Mircea Eliade's story about walking off with Claude Lévi-Strauss' raincoat.

George Carlin on Diminished Choices

Calendar page © Dana Potter (2013)

Above Layout for a calendar page (its theme determined by a quote) by Dana Potter, graphic design student, Department of Art, University of Northern Iowa.

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George Carlin, in an interview in David Jay Brown, Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse (NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 191—

We're given many choices to distract us from the fact that our real choices have been diminished in number. Two political parties. Maybe three or four large banks now. Credit card companies, just a couple, a handful. Newspapers, reduced. Ownership of media, reduced, down to five or six companies now. Big stock brokerage firms, reduced in number. In all of these important things we have less choice. Then we're distracted with these frivolous choices: 21 flavors of ice cream, 35 flavors of popcorn. You see specialty shops with 35 flavors of popcorn, like chocolate walnut popcorn. These are absurd distractions from what we are doing to ourselves…

Inattentional Blindness | Thoreau

From Henry Petroski, The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance. New York: Knopf, 1989, pp. 3-4—

Henry David Thoreau seemed to think of everything when he made a list of essential supplies for a twelve-day excursion into the Maine woods. He included pins, needles, and thread among the items to be carried in an India-rubber knapsack, and he even gave the dimensions of an ample tent: "six by seven feet, and four feet high in the middle, will do." He wanted to be doubly sure to be able to start a fire and to wash up, and so he listed: "matches (some also in a small vial in the waist-coat pocket); soap, two pieces." He specified the number of old newspapers (three or four, presumably to be used for cleaning chores), the length of strong cord (twenty feet), the size of his blanket (seven feet long), and the amount of "soft hardbread" (twenty-eight pounds!)…
 

But there is one object that Thoreau neglected to mention, one that he most certainly carried himself. For without this object Thoreau could not have sketched either the fleeting fauna he would not shoot or the larger flora he could not uproot. Without it he could not label his blotting paper pressing leaves or his insect boxes holding beetles; without it he could not record the measurements he made; without it he could not write home on the paper he brought; without it he could not make his list. [He had forgotten to mention the pencil that enabled him to make the list.]