{"id":3045,"date":"2011-05-01T08:44:08","date_gmt":"2011-05-01T12:44:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.mohonkimages.com\/journal\/2011\/05\/the-act-of-creation\/"},"modified":"2011-05-01T08:44:08","modified_gmt":"2011-05-01T12:44:08","slug":"the-act-of-creation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mohonkimages.com\/journal\/2011\/05\/the-act-of-creation\/","title":{"rendered":"The Act of Creation"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Marcelo Gleiser, writing on an NPR blog about laughter and health, observes that:<\/p>\n<p><em>Arthur Koestler, in <\/em>The Act of Creation<em>, develops the argument that humor and creativity have a lot in common: in a good joke, there is a rupture of the logic, a point where the narrative departs from its natural flow and takes a sharp turn to the unexpected. That&#39;s when we laugh. You can&#39;t control it, it just happens. If you retrace your steps and explain the joke to someone who didn&#39;t get it, it isn&#39;t funny anymore.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>I think that may be the reason many of us find contemporary works of art less than satisfying: we feel intuitively that if the work needs to be explained, the essence is lost &#8212; perhaps it was never there to begin with.<\/p>\n<div class=\"tpad-img-center\">\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.mohonkimages.com\/journal\/6a01156f6c1fc1970b01538e3b3953970b-800wi\/\"><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"P-0403\" class=\"asset  asset-image at-xid-6a01156f6c1fc1970b01538e3b3953970b\" src=\"https:\/\/www.mohonkimages.com\/journal\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/6a01156f6c1fc1970b01538e3b3953970b-500wi.jpg\" title=\"P-0403\" \/><\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Marcelo Gleiser, writing on an NPR blog about laughter and health, observes that: Arthur Koestler, in The Act of Creation, develops the argument that humor and creativity have a lot in common: in a good joke, there is a rupture of the logic, a point where the narrative departs from its natural flow and takes [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3045","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mohonkimages.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3045","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mohonkimages.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mohonkimages.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mohonkimages.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mohonkimages.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3045"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.mohonkimages.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3045\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mohonkimages.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3045"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mohonkimages.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3045"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mohonkimages.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3045"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}