Nachhilfeunterricht Nr. 1 für AG, LG und OLG München: Internet-Memes

Meme forbidden in Germany.

Contravenes allegedly Criminal Code 86a

"The view that humour is generated through the combination of different frames or input spaces can be traced back to Koestler’s (1964, 51, quoted in Coulson 2002) quotation presented below.

The sudden bisociation of an idea or event with two habitually incompatible matrices will produce a comic effect, provided that the narrative, the semantic pipeline, carries the right kind of emotional tension. When the pipe is punctured, and our expectations are fooled, the now redundant tension gushes out in laughter, or is spilled in the gentler form of the sou-rire. 

 Commenting on this hypothesis, Coulson (2002) emphasises that, in Koestler’s view, humour includes “the unlikely combination of related structures”. In addition, Brône and Feyaerts (2003) regard Hofstadter and Gabora (1989) as the predecessors of conceptual integration theory in humour because their use of the term frame blend implies combining different frames."

aus: 

Is a Picture Really Worth a Thousand Political Words? Political Internet Memes and Conceptual Blending.

"As already mentioned, it is believed (Coulson 2002, Marín-Arrese 2003) that the incongruity produced in the blend is the key element in the creation of humour. In addition, it can also be claimed that this is a characteristic of humorous blends only. However, what all blends have in common are backward projections from the blend into input spaces (Fauconnier and Turner 2002). It is believed that this cognitive operation is a decisive element in the resolution of humour. In that sense, Marín-Arrese (2003) claims that “[t]he problem solving or resolution of the incongruity is realised by projecting backward to these input spaces ...”. Therefore, to resolve the incongruity, the reader has to unpack the blend, that is, to reconstruct the whole integration network. As Fauconnier and Turner (2002, 333) claim, the reader first recognises the incongruity which then prompts him to reconstruct the input spaces. 

Furthermore, Coulson (2002) finds that the emergent structure in the blend can promote the construals in the input spaces by projecting from the blended space to input spaces. In a series of papers, Coulson (1996, 2002, 2005, 2006) discusses jokes and political cartoons providing evidence that humorous blends, with bizarre concepts arising in the blended space, can promote certain aspects of reality. “Political cartoons and rhetorically motivated discourse prompt us to construct blended cognitive models and, in effective cases of rhetoric, desired inferences are analogically projected from blatantly unrealistic blended cognitive models to the real-world target domain” (Coulson 2006, 197-8). Therefore, backward projections from the blended space to input spaces reinforce construals in input spaces in accordance with the new structure created in the blend. 

In that sense, it can be claimed that unrealistic scenarios arising in the blended space often have argumentative potential. In a series of papers Coulson and associates (Coulson 2006, Coulson and Oakley 2006, Coulson and Pascual 2006, Oakley and Coulson 2008) discuss blending and its rhetorical potential. These papers find that conceptual integration as a basic cognitive mechanism can be used as a rhetorical tool influencing the audience to change the reality and even act upon it. Furthermore, analysing blending in persuasive discourse, Coulson and Pascual (2006) find that conceptual integration of two scenarios in a single absurd scenario in the blended space presents an effective argumentative tactic. Although such blends are not constructed in order to be entertaining, creative, and humorous but in order to convince the addressee to change the current state of affairs or to persuade the addressee to change his or her convictions, what these blends and humorous blends have in common are unrealistic scenarios created in the blended space."

Alles klar im Kangaroo Court München?!