I woke up, made a quick sketch, and went back to sleep.” This same element of bizarre juxtaposition is at the core of the humor in this cartoon by New Yorker cartoonist Joe Dator, who says: “This cartoon appeared whole in my dream. I took a bath in melted butter and forgot to dry off I accidentally got my boyfriend pregnant I was in bed with a monkey doing the newspaper crosswords The comic potential of these are obvious in a few of the chapter headings from his book The Night of Your Life: The third element in dreams that strike our waking mind as funny - the bizarre juxtaposition of incongruous elements - inspired graphic artist Jesse Reklaw to produce two graphic novels that portray the dreams of other people, as they describe them. ©Sam Cobean/The New Yorker Collection 2012 While some of these represented daydreams, others did refer to nighttime dreams, such the one below: “ frame of a husband ending up “in the dog house.”Ī second source of humor - the covert expression of forbidden impulses, whether sexual, hostile, or regressively dependent - is represented by cartoonists in the “dream bubble.” Sam Cobean’s captionless 1940s New Yorker cartoons are often credited as the first dream bubbles. Of Freud’s many punlike examples, the only one robust in a translation from German to English featured a sexual encounter in a car interpreted as “autoeroticism.” Many of the amusing dream images I’ve encountered are literalizations of idioms - a family’s “black sheep,” an ambivalent dreamer “straddling the fence,” and another finding herself and her husband “on the rocks.” A century ago, Winsor McKay’s famous cartoon strips, “Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend” (so named as the cheesy dish was said to produce weird dreams), illustrated idioms showing up in dreams - as in this “Rarebit. Bizarre juxtapositions: what our dreaming mind fails to label as “not making sense” will strike our waking sensibilities as funny.įreud wrote in The Interpretation of Dreams of “visual representation”: the tendency of a verbal phrase to be represented by an image. The emergence of forbidden impulses: the sex and aggression that escape sleep’s indolent censor are fuel for humor, andģ. Puns: language use drops in dreams, but the sound of words plays a larger role relative to meaning,Ģ. There are not all that many funny dreams, but at least three elements general to dream creativity can benefit cartooning:ġ. ©Robert Mankoff/The New Yorker Collection 2012 (More on other forms of dream creativity can be found in my talk at TEDxKnoxville.) I realized this was one area of nocturnal creativity I hadn’t covered at all. It contained the example below example–straight from a dream, and a fascinating description of how cartoons can originate in dreams. But a year after my book, The Committee of Sleep, came out describing art, fiction, scientific inventions arriving in dreams, Bob Mankoff, The New Yorker’s cartoon editor, published The Naked Cartoonist. I’ve spent more than a decade researching dreams and creativity. I want to tell TED readers a bit about using dreams for cartooning and then send you over there to target them! I have a blog post of my own over at the New Yorker Cartoon Desk this week challenging readers to dream up–literally–captions for this week’s contest. While The New Yorker hasn’t announced the finalists yet for contest #336 (finalists will appear online June 11), the entry posted by TED speaker Roger Ebert on his own blog gives a taste of what to expect: In early May, the image (supplied by cartoonist Harry Bliss) to be captioned was this: The New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest targeted TED recently. In this post, she looks at the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest, which recently featured a cartoon involving what might be a TED speaker’s worst nightmare … It started when, over on New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff’s blog, she threw out a challenge: Can you (literally) dream up a great caption ? We asked for more: Guest blogger Deirdre Barrett is a psychologist who researches dreams and sleep - and explores how dreams can be used to unlock waking-world problems.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |