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The Act of Creation

CHAPTER 1: THE LOGIC OF LAUGHTER

  • Humor, discovery, art

  • Comic comparison à Make us laugh

  • Objective analogy à Make us understand

  • Poetic image à Makes us marvel

  • Comic à Aggressive

  • Reasoning à Emotionally detached

  • Poetic à Sympathetic

  • Aggressive à Neutral à Sympathetic

  • Science aims at truth, art aims at beauty

THE LAUGHTER REFLEX

  • Laughter is a reflex

  • Smile à laughter

                      TRAGIC                                                                                           COMIC

 

CHAPTER 2: LAUGHTER AND EMOTION

  1. AGRESSION AND IDENTIFICATION

    • Laughter deplects anger

    • Practical joke à aggressive

    • Lavatory Jokes à scatological

    • Blue jokes à sexual

    • “presence of salt in a well-prepared dish which, however, would be tasteless without it”

    • Aggressive element

    • The theory of degradation: delight in suffering, contempt for the unfamiliar

    • What is laughter? Discharge-mechanism for redundant tension

    • “the self is experienced as being a part of a larger whole” pg. 54

  2. THE INERTIA OF EMOTION

    • “Emotions and sensations tend to generate bodily movement” pg. 55

    • “the puffing away of emotion discarded by thought” pg. 56

    • Placing laughter with the evolution of our emotions

    • A quote relating to this section, from Human Action: “emotion tends to beget bodily emotion”

    • Defensive emotions: inertia, persistency more mass momentum than reason.

    • Laughter is a state of the body where we are less resistant

  3. MECHANISM OF LAUGHTER

    • Tension that needs to be released

    • Our emotions can’t keep up with our reason.

  4. THE IMPORTANCE OF NOT BEING EARNEST

    • Emotion vs. Reason

    • Artist vs. Jester

    • Not a clear division between logic and emotion.

 

CHAPTER 3&4

  •  How to direct any specimen of humor?

    • Find the link (focal concept, word or situation

    • Define character of emotive charge

    • Make a guess regarding the unconscious element

  • Pun and Witticism

    • Bisociation of a single phonetic form with two meanings

  • Man and Animal

    • Disney creatures maintaining their animal essence

    • Comic: double existence

  • Impersonation

    • Two different people at one time

    • Leads to different reactions

  • The Child-Adult

  • The Trivial and the Exalted

    • Parody

    • The line between what’s funny and what is not

  • Caricature and Satire

    • Symbols trigger off memories and expectations

    • Scanning the cartoon

    • Delaying understanding while “seeing the joke”

    • Portrait caricature: familiar shapes being transformed as if the body were elastic

    • Exaggerating features

  • The Misfit

    • Physical & mental malformations

  • Allegories and Utopias

  • The Paradox of the Centipede.

 

CHAPTER 10

  • “The evolution of ideas is a tale of ever repeated differentiation, specialization and reintegration on a higher level; a progression from primordial unity through variety to more complex patterns of unity-in variety” page. 226

  • Progress can never go wrong

  • Evolution constantly goes wrong!

  • Closeness to achieving absolute truth

  • Milagro Quiroa: “Everything in nature is given”

  • In the video of “celebrating what’s right with the world” how we need to find different angles to take pictures and get the best one.

  • There is no history without theory

  • The collecting of data is a discriminating activity?

  • “Without the hard little bits of marble which are called facts or data one cannot compose a mosaic; what matters, however, are not so much the individual bit, but the successive patterns into which you arrange the,, then break the up, and rearrange them” pg.235

  • When there’s controversy there is more interest in finding the truth.

 

CHAPTER 11: SCIENCE & EMOTION

  • Benevolent Magician

  • Archtype Mad Professor

  • Malicious Jester, The mad professor, uninspired pedant; Benevolent magician, and the artist

  • Isa: Having the notion of finding Gods

  • “The sublimination  of the self-transcending emotions has transformed “magic” into “science”

  • Magic and science

  • Bert: A magician breaks the rules

  • The magical aspect of experience.

  • Lore: “Happy is he who bears a god within an ideal of beauty and who obeys it, an ideal of art, of science. All are lighted by reflection from the infinite” pg.262

  • What is longing? Prolonged unfulfilled desire or need

  • Bert: “The same inhuman-infact anti-humanistic trend pervades the climate in which science is taught, the classrooms and the textbooks. To derive pleasure from the art of discovery, as the student must be made to re live, to some extent, the creative process

  • ACCEPT THE INVITATION!!!

 

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