This section is about a major area in the landscape of the human imagination, and how the logic of that area is twisted by humour, thus revealing its contour lines and general topography... But first a personal note.
I well remember when I first started to see a pattern in the large number of cartoons placed on my floor. It was an exciting moment, even though in retrospect, I started off by making a bad mistake. But perhaps I should first explain why I chose to look at cartoons rather than the more normal form of verbal jokes.
Firstly, cartoons, especially when no captions are present, are - apart from slapstick - the most international form taken by the joke. And as we want to cover the many, rather than the few, it makes sense to focus on this wider visual dimension if at all possible.
Secondly, it is just so much easier to recognise cartoons, one from the other, when sifting through a large amount of joke material, because they all have a quickly recognisable face, quite unlike the anonymity of multiple portions of text...
Thirdly, I was very conscious of the importance of finding an area of relative simplicity to focus on. Not least because I had recently been teaching a very bright spanish philosophy graduate about scientific method - she knew Mendel's notebooks backwards - and she had reminded me of Mendel's 'lucky choice'. 'Lucky' because Mendel had looked at just those 7 characteristics of pea plants that inherit in a simple way, thus avoiding, complex systems like multiple alleles and polygenes which would have made his first forays into genetics impossible. And as cartoons favour the visible physical world, which is simpler than much of the rest of human meaning, I might have a better chance of breaking into humour that way.
And luckily for me, several possible areas did indeed seem to be emerging from the chaos of cartoons strewn across my floor. It was a slow business as many of the paths led to dead ends. But gradually I became familiar with an area of this 'landscape of meaning' as I liked to think of it. Two areas in fact. One being, as it were, a valley (of shadows and reflections), and the other a plateau (of two and three dimensional copies and doubles). Both becoming visible because of the way in which the jokes twist the contours of the local meaning in these two areas, revealing the underlying topography in the process.
What emerged before my eyes was a place I had never even dreamed of, even though I knew all of its intricate details as intimately as the inside of my own home. Indeed it was the sheer reality and extent of this area of meaning that made me realise that the landscape of meaning was so much more than just the shadowy image I had dreamt up in a seminar in Oxford. It was almost as if the clouds of complexity that mist and fog our everyday life, and which totally obscure the bigger picture, had lifted for a moment, to reveal a landscape below, full of colour and forms that I had never guessed at. A place that I could now begin to map. As if I was about to venture inside my own head, where the jester guide would show me how all the stuff I knew but didn’t actually understand could fit together in a yet greater pattern of meaning. A pattern which would show just how feasible, fascinating and inevitable a science of meaning really is in our immediate future.
It is to one of these two areas of this landscape of meaning that we now turn.