Cognitive Science professor Seana Coulson writes in 2005:
* When speakers produce language, listeners use that linguistic input along with background and contextual knowledge to set up simple cognitive models in mental spaces (Coulson, Semantic Leaps). Similarly, when people look at cartoons, or, indeed, the events of the world, they partition the input into different mental spaces, each structured by cognitive models from a relevant domain.
* Presumably, it is no accident that frame blends were first noticed in the context of humorous examples. The possibility of creating novel concepts from familiar ones is obviously conducive to humor. As Arthur Koestler writes: “To cause surprise the humorist must have a modicum of originality—the ability to break away from the stereotyped routines of thought. Caricaturist, satirist, the writer of nonsense-humour, and even the expert tickler, each operates on more than one plane. Whether his purpose is to convey a social message, or merely to entertain, he must provide mental jolts, caused by the collision of incompatible matrices. To any given situation or subject he must conjure up an appropriate—or appropriately inappropriate—intruder which will provide the jolt.”
* In a study of political cartoons, I have noted that blending is frequently used to project a modern-day politician into a ridiculous scenario that helps illustrate the cartoonist’s political position (“What’s”). For example, during the sex scandal that led to former U.S. President Bill Clinton’s impeachment, a cartoon by Jeff MacNelly depicted Clinton in a scene that most Americans associate with eighteenth-century President George Washington. Legend has it that when George Washington was a boy, he chopped down a cherry tree on his father’s farm. When his father discovered what had happened, he went, furiously, to his family and demanded to know who had chopped down the tree. Knowing that he would likely receive a spanking for his honesty, Washington stood up and said, “I cannot tell a lie. It was I who chopped down the cherry tree.” In the cartoon we see a toppled tree and Clinton, dressed in Colonial garb, wielding an electric chainsaw. He says, “When I denied chopping down the cherry tree I was legally accurate.” The use of blended structure in the cartoon thus highlights the disanalogy between public perception of Washington as honest to a fault and Clinton as someone who had appropriated legalistic tactics to deceive those around him.
* To address the use of conceptual integration in conversational jokes, an excerpt from the syndicated radio talk show Loveline is analysed below. The show, based in Los Angeles, encourages its listeners to phone the radio station to ask questions about sex, drugs, and relationships. The show has two hosts, Dr. Drew, a board certified physician who specializes in treating patients with drug addiction, and Adam Carolla, a comedian known for lowbrow humor. The show frequently has celebrity guests, such as actors and musicians, whom the hosts interview when there is a lull in the calls. The bulk of the show, however, consists of conversations between the hosts and their callers, as well as conversations between the hosts themselves, in which they make fun of their callers’ problems. Columnist Marc Fisher described the show in his column “The Listener” in the Washington Post: “A comedian, Adam Carolla, and an actual physician, Drew Pinsky, sit in the studio, trying to be unbelievably cool. Virtually anything goes in their moral universe. They talk about their own experiences with drugs and sex. They get serious when confronted with potential suicides, domestic abuse or fools having unprotected sex. But kids who want to know about which drugs to mix, young people boasting about their experience with threesomes and more, men and women looking for approval for promiscuity—all get a condoning, even celebratory welcome. Carolla is not above the occasional rape joke. And “Dr. Drew” seems to get his kicks out of young people describing their artificial ecstasies.”
The excerpt analyzed below comes from an episode of Loveline that aired live on 20 February 2002. The caller, a teenaged boy, after describing a sexual encounter he had, has asked the doctor if he might be suffering from a medical problem. The caller claims to have had two orgasms in a row during oral sex with his girlfriend. The somewhat incredulous hosts’ subsequent discussion of the boy’s experience runs as follows:
[1] Adam: Well listen, the Lord was kind to you that day.
[2] Dr. Drew: He spoke directly to him.
[3] Adam: Drew, do you think anything’s wrong with the guy?
[4] Dr. Drew: No, no, no.
[5] Adam: Well listen just enjoy it.
[6] It happened to you once.
[7] It’ll be like some sort of a Holy Grail you chase for the rest of your life.
[8] But y’know count yourself among the blest.
[9] It happened to you once and that’s more than it’s happened to me.
[10] Dr. Drew: Well this could be some kind of a Purgatory,
[11] sort of a Sisyphus like [pause]
[12] constantly trying to recreate that and
[13] never quite achieving it.
[14] Adam: It is sort of a strange thing that
[15] you have this incredible sort of never–ending orgasm once and then
[16] end up chasing it like it was Moby Dick for the rest of your life.
Even the most cursory reading of the transcript suggests that the hosts’ humor relies heavily on conceptual blending, as the caller’s sexual experience is construed with frames and cultural models that originate in religion, mythology, and literature. For example, in (1), Adam compares the boy’s second orgasm to a miracle bestowed by God. The mappings in this blend are outlined in table 3. In the generic miracle input, God bestows a miracle on a faithful member of his flock. Of course the precise characterization of the miracle differs from occasion to occasion. Famous miracles in Christian lore include turning water into wine, walking on water, and raising a man from the dead. The composition of the orgasm from the sex input with the miracle from the miracle input is part of what makes Adam’s comment in (1) funny. Moreover, hyperbolically framing the orgasm as an
act of God subtly conveys Adam’s skepticism about the boy’s story.
In (2), Dr. Drew expands on Adam’s joke about God by saying, “He spoke directly to him.” Again, the alleged experience is understood by blending a cognitive model of the boy’s sexual encounter with a model of God speaking to a faithful follower. Just as a miracle is construed as an unlikely occurrence, so too is an occasion of God speaking to a follower. In the Bible, God speaks audibly only to prophets such as Moses and saints such as Paul. By framing the caller as the recipient of a message from God, Drew somewhat ironically implies that the boy
has saintly properties that caused him to be singled out in this fashion. The irony derives from the fact that, in the modern era, claims to conversational interactions with God are treated as a sign of mental illness.
The Holy Grail is typically thought to be the vessel that Jesus Christ drank from at the Last Supper and that subsequently Joseph of Arimathea used to catch Christ’s blood as he hung on the cross. In the Arthurian legends, a knight (in some accounts Sir Percival and others Sir Galahad) is bound to go on a quest to retrieve the Holy Grail. In the Arthurian legends, this quest for the Grail was considered the highest spiritual pursuit. Consistent with the miracle and the message blends, Adam’s Holy Grail blend has the effect of imbuing the boy with knightly qualities and the orgasm with spiritual properties. The contrast between default affective responses to each of the inputs, coupled with the abstract commonalities needed to set up the blend, creates the comic effect.
The characterization of the boy as having been singled out by a deity for a unique experience is made explicit in (8) when Adam says, “But y’know count yourself among the blest.” Moreover, in (9) Adam’s utterance suggests a certain skepticism surrounding the possibility that the experience the caller described will ever be repeated.
