Step one: research!

Posted on April 23, 2012 by Victoria

In which I pretend to be a scientist

Before the post a few weeks ago about research on sexist humor, it simply hadn’t occurred to me that there might be people out there in the world who got paid to study humor scientifically.  I think this is awesome, and in retrospect should’ve suspected as much.

Now that I know, however, I’ve started doing one of those things that scientists do – check out what everyone else has already done. :)

I am somewhat hampered in this by two things: I don’t have easy access to a library that has serious academic journal subscriptions; “humor theory” searches also get you theories about blood, phlegm, and two kinds of bile.  I do have the internet, though, which will at least get me started.

One of the many theories: Pattern Recognition

One of the modern theories about humor that caught my eye (for possibly obvious reasons) is called the Pattern Recognition Theory of Humor.  It was first proposed in 2008 by Alastair Clarke, and clarified in 2009.

In short, this theory proposes that humor arises from the patterns we see around us in everything and things that either match or don’t match those patterns.  That’s one reason why it is appealing – it doesn’t rely on any single cultural or historical context – your humor is based on the patterns you expect.

Which sounds like just the thing to explain the popularity of “memes”, snowclones, and other popular forms of humor … except that in his clarification, Clarke makes it really clear that it’s about the repetition, not about any deviation or variance.  I’m relatively unconvinced by this –  simple repetition of the same thing over and over is … well, not very funny.

Take Monty Python’s “I Like Traffic Lights” song.  Funny once. Maybe.

I suppose that one could consider the sorts of frameworks that make up snowclones and “memes” to be the basis for the repetition, but without the variation, they wouldn’t actually be amusing.

I’ve only seen a little bit on what’s out there for this so far – anyone have better/more interesting/more useful links?

Email, RSS Follow
Email
Share on Tumblr
Posted in Humor Theory, RiotNrrd | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Step one: research!

The leaning tree

Posted on April 20, 2012 by Victoria
A tree leans way to the right

Experimentation with trunk growth

Yes, it’s another tree.  Perhaps this blog will become all trees all the time … at least for a few more months.

I’ve been trying to experiment with the trees in the last few weeks, giving them different branchings and environments and even a bit of shiny.

This one seems to have grown up in a really windy place, causing it to lean over to the side.

Email, RSS Follow
Email
Share on Tumblr
Posted in I Made An Art | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Fingers of Stone, Pool of Clouds (alternate) (431)

Posted on April 13, 2012 by Victoria

I commented on my original version of this that it nearly was a horror story, and just might work better as one.  I’ve been sitting on the horror version since then. Today, I’m out of town and can’t scan the trees I have done, so for your Friday artistic post, here is the alternate version of Fingers of Stone, Pool of Clouds:

Summertime, and the air was still chilled.  Wispy clouds drifted across the sky.  She shifted the backpack, moving the strap off of the latest sore spot.  Almost there, she thought, and kept her eyes down on the path in front of her. No sense in slipping and breaking something now – the top would be there when she got there.

The fingers of stone reached out of the mountain, reaching futilely for the sky.  Between them, the water reflected the deep blue sky, fragments of clouds tissue thin.  Still there.  Always there.

The path leveled out in front of her, and then spread out across the small flat peak.  Now she could look out in every direction, see the swells of land and forest below.  The horizon is so much further away up here, she thought.  At first, she was fascinated by things far away – the forests, the horizon, the trails of clouds.  Slowly, she began to look at closer objects, looking at the path she had come up and then for the one she planned to take back down.

Then, some ways down, she saw the pool, full of blue sky with the bottom stones showing through, calling to her.  Her eyes followed a trail back up from the pool to the top.  Yes, it was on her path down, and she could stop there to eat and have a drink.  It would be chill, but she was warm enough.

She went down carefully.  There was no sense in slipping now, either.  The pool was not quite as large as it had seemed from the top, but the pillars of stone rose just above her head.  She put her pack down near the water’s edge and looked out to the horizon again, before digging out some food and a cup.

She knelt on a large rock at the edge with the cup in her hand, and found herself staring at the sky still reflected in the water.  Could you drink the sky? She wondered and reached her flat palm out to touch the water, as if to put her hand on a cloud.

The water seeped around her hand in rivulets, winding themselves like fingers, and held on.  She pulled, trying to free her hand from the icy water, but she was already off-balance.  The water flowed up her arm as she fell, surrounding her and the cry not a soul could hear.

The fingers of stone reach up from the face of the mountain.  Between them, a pool of still water reflects the scattered clouds.  Still there.  Always there.

Email, RSS Follow
Email
Share on Tumblr
Posted in Flash Fiction | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Where beauty meets logic

Posted on April 9, 2012 by Victoria

Not just a bad teen dramedy.

One of my favorite polymath tricks is to take the nerdy and reframe it in ways that make it  intuitive and appealing to the person who is not just “not a nerd” but thinks they can’t possibly do those nerdy things.

I’m far from alone in this these days, and in some cases, they’re making nerdy things and information even better and more beautiful than anyone might’ve ever thought.  In particular, I adore the folks over at Information Is Beautiful and, at a time when logic and the intellect are seemingly drowned out by the power of ignorance, I most especially want to share one of their latest productions: Rhetological Fallacies.

Rhetological Fallacies are errors and manipulations of rhetoric and logical fallacies.  They’ve turned them into simple, beautiful icons, suitable for inserting into your analyses and rebuttals of all sorts of lame, disingenuous, manipulative arguments.

A funny thing, that logic stuff.

Not surprisingly, immediately on the heels of “pretty and logical together! awesome!”, I started thinking about how this ties in with humor.  Isn’t that one of the ways to make humor – taking the known and overturning one bit of the logic that holds it all up?

Email, RSS Follow
Email
Share on Tumblr
Posted in Humor Theory, RiotNrrd | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Where beauty meets logic

The airplane tree

Posted on April 4, 2012 by Victoria

On a recent airplane trip, I started drawing a smaller tree as we were coming in towards landing.  One of the airline attendants, coming through “one last time”, happened to catch sight of me and commented on how pretty it was.  She even pointed it out to the other attendant.

I’m pretty happy with it:

A sketch of a tree

The airline attendants liked this one, but still made me put my pens away for the landing.

Email, RSS Follow
Email
Share on Tumblr
Posted in I Made An Art | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Researchers demonstrate the effects of humor

Posted on April 2, 2012 by Victoria

Researchers aren’t like the rest of us.

For one, they go out and use SCIENCE to check out the things most of us just “know”.  They try not to assume too much about why or how things happen so that they can test out their ideas.

A bit ago, a friend of mine linked me to this blog post: “Turns out, it’s worse for women if you’re funny when you’re sexist! Who knew…”

Now, I’m not one to take this on face value, even though it cites some articles and books.  I want to know what’s in those sources.  Given the sparse citations and lack of bibliography, it took some work, and it turns out that some aren’t actually research.  Some of the key findings, however, seem to be based on actual research … I just don’t have access to get the articles themselves:

Ford, T.E. (2000). Effects of Sexist Humor on Tolerance of Sexist Events. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 26 (9), 1094-1107. http://psp.sagepub.com/content/26/9/1094.short

Thomas E. Ford, Christie F. Boxer, Jacob Armstrong, and Jessica R. Edel (2008). More Than “Just a Joke”: The Prejudice-Releasing Function of Sexist Humor
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin February 2008 34: 159-170, first published on December 4, 2007 http://psp.sagepub.com/content/34/2/159.short

If anyone has access to these two and can email me a copy, that would be wonderbar.

Serious research is serious.  Even when it comes to humor.

I’m also generally interested in humor research and especially the damaging effects of negative humor related to all sorts of -isms (even ones that don’t apply to me).  I went looking for some more general studies and found this blog post in Psychology Today: Does Racist humor promote racism?

That, in turn, lead me to the International Society for Humor Studies, which sounds just plain fascinating.  If I can find a way to ILL some of their articles, there’ll be more posts.

In the meantime, the take-away message is that, no matter how many times you say “sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me”, negative humor does makes things worse.

Email, RSS Follow
Email
Share on Tumblr
Posted in Humor Theory | Tagged , , | 5 Comments