Okay, first off, I've got back involved in our local theatre again, now that the all the construction has pretty much settled down and we're at the stage where I can actually help. Our grand opening is January 31 and the first play (a musical, actually) opens at the end of February. We shall be very busy little bees. But yesterday was the first chance I had to set foot on the new stage and... wow. Even with nobody in the audience, not even any chairs there, and no play and no set and nothing but house lights, it was still so...invigorating. I caught myself bouncing on my toes and grinning like an idiot. I wanted to stride around the stage and quote bits of Shakespeare and old plays. I felt that that same tingle in the gut, blood thrumming through my veins that I got the first time I set foot inside the Rice football stadium and realized "One day, very soon, I will be out here performing. And it feels GREAT." I don't have to wonder why fading actors and actresses will do anything, any hack script or two-bit touring company, to keep acting. The stage gets into your blood.

Secondly, I have a question. And I suppose since there's the off chance that some prurient relative or highly sheltered child might read this (although really, if this offends them, but my M&M porn doesn't, then they should really get their head examined), I shall put this behind a cut tag, for it is a linguistic question about a term some people dislike to see or hear. ( Active vs. Passive )

See, to wander off in what seems to be a totally different direction for a little while, in my comedy class a few years ago, we learned that one of the leading current theories as to why we find something funny is cognitive dissonance. Basically this means that we (our brains) are led to believe that one thing is going to happen, and that when something else happens instead it sets off a sort of mental fire alarm. To put it in more linguistic terms, one signifier—the setup—would in a normal, non-comedic situation lead to signified A. But in the comedic situation it instead leads to signified B. Thus the neural pathways for both signified A and signified B are activated, leading to cognitive dissonance.

So, in a pun, the punned word or phrase has both it’s situational meaning and its normal meaning. Of course, there’s more to making something funny than just good ole cognitive dissonance. Otherwise I’d be laughing my ass off every time someone wrote “their” for “there.”

But I believe that it is this dissonance that is at the heart of creativity. What captures our imagination is the ability to see a pattern and then subvert it. Creative works of art (film, literature, TV, etc.) are about changing the established patterns. They capture our interest because they give us such dissonance. After all, if you show me a long series of blue squares I’ll soon forget each one, but if you throw a blue circle or a red square in there, I’ll remember those.

This explains the success of parody—the thrill of deliberate pattern recognition allowing us to find the “bits” from other movies, while the changes to certain aspects of the pattern keep us from becoming bored with the old pattern. See, the ability of a pattern to create cognitive dissonance only lasts for a short time. Repeated activation leads to it becoming an established pattern, and then it no longer brings up any dissonance. This explains why sequels usually fare so poorly. They are not usually different enough from the first pattern for us to perceive them as a different pattern.

But what about repeated viewings of a favorite movies? Why do they make us laugh, since, after all, they are now one of our “old” patterns and no longer produce cognitive dissonance? But they do produce the “memory” of that dissonance, an echo of it. Sequels are not exactly the same movie—they cannot generate as much of that ‘echo.’ And in effect, sometimes our laughter can become more of a learned response, than a spontaneous consequence of certain stimuli.

Of course, I could be (and probably am) totally wrong. But it does all make sense in my head. If only the network execs (and the toy producers, and the record execs….) would see that creativity is not math and that the formula which succeeds once will not necessarily succeed (at least as well) half a dozen more times. These clones (of toys, musicians, shows, etc.) battle it out, each trying to carve a niche for themselves in our brains, and succeed only in saturizing our consciences with boring repeats of blue squares, while we yearn desperately for a red circle.

Unfortunately, it looks as though that pattern will continue.

Last night I ventured a brief foray into the bleak wasteland that is known as primetime network television. I don’t actually watch much TV anymore, and most of that is satellite stuff. For network TV, “Whose Line” and “Crossing Jordan” are the only shows that spring to mind. WLIIA is just that damn funny and CJ has Bugs and Nigel [note to self: must see if there are any Bugs/Nigel fanfics on the net] But last night, as I say, I briefly tuned in while waiting for Crossing Jordan. And discovered what is wrong with network TV.

Some day, some network exec sat down at a meeting and said, “You know what everybody loves right now? Reality TV. And you know why? ‘Cause it has real people doing disgusting and humiliating things to gain fame while wearing bikinis. And you know what else they love? Game shows. ‘Cause they love watching real people doing disgusting and humiliating things to gain money. So you know what we do? We combine the two. Reality game shows—people doing disgusting and humiliating things in bikinis for money! It’ll be a smash hit!” And thus was born Fear Factory. And Dog Eat Dog. And Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire. And The Bachelor. And Bachelorettes in Alaska. And Meet the Parents. And the Hamptons. And on and on ad nauseum.

Sometimes all those people with the placards chanting that Armaggedon is nigh don’t seem so crazy. It is very, very scary when you can easily imagine King’s “Running Man” actually appearing on NBC this fall. Talk about a “Most Dangerous Game” show.

Of course one of the reasons for all this is pattern recognition. As someone on the Terry Pratchett message board said the other day—human beings have evolved incredibly formidable pattern recognition skills. [It’s a survival trait—this animal looks a lot like that animal I killed yesterday by hitting it with a rock here, so maybe I should try hitting this animal with a rock here.] This is normally a good thing, and quite handy for the development of the sciences, math, criminology, and cooking. Of course, sometimes this also means that we find patterns even when they aren’t really there.

It is this flaw in our pattern recognization skills which leads to such things as stereotypes, sloppy reasoning, and most of the literary criticism out there today.

TO BE CONTINUED LATER TODAY....