Blogging with Arthur Koestler

One of the pressures of being serious about blogging is the need to produce original and interesting material at regular intervals. Often I arrive at my blogging day (every second day) with no ideas, no inspiration and nothing to say. It is at times like these that my strategy for pulling posts out of thin air swings into action.

The first thing to do is to get a fresh cup of coffee. During the walk to the kitchen and the little rituals of pouring and tasting, the theory is that the mind will suddenly produce an idea of astounding brilliance and genius. So far, this hasn't worked but I keep trying.

Staring at the screen has little effect either, although I indulge in this practice frequently. Sooner or later, I will decide that the thing to do is leave the computer, walk about and get a few household chores done. I am convinced that one day I will have the perfect inspiration while taking out the garbage, although again I must admit that it hasn't happened like that yet.

Allowing oneself half an hour to sit in front of some mindless program on the television sounds as though it should work but I am deeply suspicious of this method. Usually it results in my waking up an hour later, still devoid of ideas. What I have found to be effective on occasion is to do nothing, simply wander about the house, allowing the mind to have a break. It's a funny thing, the brain; try to make it work and it will sit down immediately and claim a backache or some other mysterious affliction. But insist that it do nothing and it will begin to ponder all sorts of weird and wonderful things, anything to avoid obedience to your intructions. Quite often it will arrive at some conclusions that are so ridiculous that a blog post can squeezed out of them.

It doesn't always work, of course. There are times when the brain is way ahead of me and knows exactly how I'm trying to fool it into working. Then it will sit there like a slug, mumbling incomprehensible nonsense and laughing at my attempts to get it moving.

That is when I begin to get desperate and have to institute the strategies of last resort. One of these is to open my Contents page, scroll down to the most recent entries and see if there's anything I can develop or that hasn't been written about for a while. The hope is that something will spring out at me and I can bash off a quick post to release the pressure.

This doesn't work either. Until today, that is. Incredibly, this morning I stumbled upon a thought process that gave me a possible post. I was idly looking down the list of previous last-minute emergency scribblings, when I came across the one that broke my long-standing record of comments, Humor and Humour. Ah, they liked that one, I thought. Normally, that would have been that and my mind would have drifted on to other things but, on this occasion, it occurred to me that there might be some secret locked away in this post's popularity. I pondered further.

It's humor, I thought, it has to be humor. People like to laugh and this one got them thinking about all their favorite comedy shows, good memories for all of us. And that reminded me of something that I read years ago, way back in the sixties, in fact.

Almost required reading in those days were a couple of books by Arthur Koestler, The Ghost in the Machine and Darkness at Noon . I liked Mr Koestler's writing so much that I read several other books by him, one of which was The Act of Creation, a solemn tome investigating the process by which mankind produces works of art and invention. It was interesting enough but what really caught my attention was Mr Koestler's theories on humor (in fact, I can't remember anything else in the book).

Old Arthur reckoned that the creation of jokes was as much an art form as painting or poetry, that it evidenced the creative impulse in us all. He backed this up with all sorts of arguments that I have since forgotten, but it matters not since I think it's a pretty acceptable theory anyway. The really interesting stuff was when he got down to trying to explain what made things funny to us. And the most important point he made was that jokes rely on a sudden switching of reality that surprises us and makes us laugh.

As an aside, it occurs to me that I read the whole book and from it I have taken one part of one theory amongst many. All the rest is lost in the mists of forgetfulness. That says something about my memory, I'm sure, but also demonstrates how we carry around things that have had an impact upon us, sometimes for the rest of our lives. It may even be that the construction of thought we think of as "ours" is really an agglomeration of bits and pieces that we have picked up in all sorts of strange places. But that's another story and I should return to Mr Koestler and this business of humor.

Apparently, many jokes (not all - there are other types of joke construction that I have forgotten) rely for their impact on lulling the listener into a sense of complacency and then altering the perspective suddenly to produce a sense of surprise and brief confusion. We even have a phrase that describes this effect; we call it "the punch line". And it is this that produces our response of laughter, an expression of the enjoyment we find in being thrust so abruptly from one reality into another.

It's coming back to me now. Mr Koestler relates the laughter reaction to fear, seeing similarities in our reactions to sudden danger and to humor. This is rather more dubious, however, and we need not go into it here.

As an instance of how this change of realities happens, I can cite from earlier in this post:

When you read "The first thing to do is to get a fresh cup of coffee. During the walk to the kitchen and the little rituals of pouring and tasting, the theory is that the mind will suddenly produce an idea of astounding brilliance and genius", I'm sure that you expected there to be some successful outcome to my strategy. But the sentence immediately following, "So far, this hasn't worked", negates one's expectations and throws all that has gone before into a completely new light. It has changed our viewpoint, in fact.

Hopefully, you found it amusing or this whole theory falls flat on its face. But I think there is truth in this, whether I succeed in being funny or not. So many of our jokes and humorous tales depend upon this punch line effect. And, get the punch line in the wrong place and it destroys the humor - there has not been sufficient easing into an accepted reality for the sudden emergence of a different reality to have full effect. So often we will say that telling a joke requires timing; that it can be funny when told by one person but desperately unfunny when told by another. And it's the timing we see as important, just the right length of pause before the punch line is delivered. That pause can be an important part of the humor in the joke; we know that the punch line is coming but a practiced comedian will have lulled us into comfort with the story so far and, when the switch comes, it still takes us by surprise.

Now that I have written all this, it strikes me that I have some pretty strange thoughts floating around in my head. Why should I have retained this theory of humor for forty years when it would have been much easier just to relax and enjoy the humor of life? Perhaps it is a part of that need we all have to understand how things work, to increase our knowledge of ourselves and the world around us.

But hey, it's given me another post, hasn't it?