September 29, 2004
Science
There’s a new study called “toonology.” It’s about scientists trying to find out what’s so funny about humor. Their lab work is to analyze the 68,647 cartoons that have appeared in the New Yorker magazine since its inception in February 1925. They’ve chosen cartoons because there’s an “incredible amount of cognitive machinery involved in understanding” them and, like the fruit fly, they’ve a short life-cycle and an easily traced heredity.
Essayist E B White chose another analogy when he said dissecting humor is like dissecting a frog: nobody is much interested, and the frog dies. It occurs to me that something like that may apply to this entry in the OoN life-cycle.
Not to leave your cognitive machinery completely humorless and somehow to drag religion into this, I’m reminded of the Peter Arno cartoon showing two young priests seated in their sumptuous study smoking cigars and sipping brandy. One is saying to the other, “Do you ever wonder where we’d be if there were no sin?”