Some wonder how creativity is possible. "How can you come up with something new, something that has never been thought of before?"
The way it seems to work is by conceptual blending, taking one or more things and putting them together, taking some elements of each input "conceptual space" (itself a metaphor) or the relationship between them to be or to project onto elements of the blended space.
"So," the questioners may say, "creativity is just putting things together, all the creations are just putting together things that already exist. Creations are really just implicit in the input."
Here the key word is "just," which does not convey information about creativity, but an attitude. Perhaps it comes from the idea that God created the Universe out of nothing, and creation out of something doesn't really count. The scripture, however, specifies when the gods created the heavens and the earth the earth was without form and void. This could imply that creation is shaping, not making something without any material to work with.
A number of humor techniques are applications of rhetorical devices. My favorite is based on the schemes chiasmus (the reversal of words or phrases) and aposiopesis (trailing off and not completing the statement).
Most of these jokes use chiasmus by letter reversal and most of them are raunchy, so you clean them up by not actually saying the punch line. There is one clean one from the early days of pope John Paul II, where upon arriving in a new country, he would always kneel and press his lips to the tarmac. “What's the difference between the pope and the common man? The common man kisses women and walks on the ground.”
Raunch warning: This next part is one of the clean dirty jokes. If you would be offended by off-color humor, cease reading here. (For that matter, why are you reading a blog about creativity anyway? If you don't enjoy raunchy, go back to your tedious life.) Here's the joke:
What's the difference between a girls' track team and a band of pigmies?
The pigmies are a bunch of cunning runts.
The unstated punch line is an example of metaplasm, the modification of sounds. (Perhaps one would say, metathesis, transposition of letters out of their normal places.)
The unstated punch line is also an example of synecdoche, the use of the whole for the part or the part for the whole, or in this case, the hole for the whole. And that remark is an example of antanaclasis, a perfect homonymic pun.
A common humor technique is catachresis, an outlandish metaphor. When used for humor, it often involves exaggerating some attribute.
Here's an example Gene Perret wrote for Phyllis Diller. Phyllis was talking about here mother-in-law "Moby Dick" (itself an example of periphrasis), a large woman. She said, "When she wears a white dress, we show home movies on her." This, of course, exaggerated the woman's size, but notice, Phyllis did not say "She is as large as a movie screen." She did not say, "She is a movie screen." Instead, she talked about treating her as they would a movie screen. (By the way, the other meaning of catachresis is using a metaphor implicitly, e.g. without introducing it with "is," so this is an example of both meanings of catachresis.)
This joke is an example of conceptual blending, combining a woman wearing a dress, and a movie screen, which is large, white, and has movies shown on it. The blend takes all the listed attributes of the movie screen, projects them on the dress, and thereby projects the attribute "large" on the woman.
Another example comes from the comedienne Judy Tenuta (via Judy Carter's Stand-Up Comedy: The Book). She refers to the guy sitting on the stool next to her in a bar who "looks like a squid in stretch pants." This exaggerates the attribute "ugly" by blending the guy sitting next to her with a squid, taking the stretch pants from the guy and putting them on the squid, projecting squid back onto the guy.
I have been thinking about a defect of our thinking noted by Edward de Bono among others. We classify things by using a representative example. We tend to include things in the class by their resemblance to the representative example.
This runs into problems with the logical NOT operation. We need to find a representative element for everything that is not something, which is not in practice possible. What is "not a blackbird?" A bluejay? A spider? A pebble? A blue giant star? This representative example of the "NOT X" set is presumably what we mean by "the opposite of X."
It gets us into trouble especially when we construct popular versions of scientific understandings. In the past century, we have discovered limitations on knowledge in both physics and mathematics with names like "relativity," "uncertainty," "chaos," "incompleteness," and "incomputability." This is easily popularized to "there is no truth, hence all ideas are equally valid."
Of course, they don't mean that at all. Indeed, the mathematical limitations on knowledge are themselves provable and true. The physical limitations have passed the tests performed on them by the experimentalists. Things that have been proven false are false.
