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 a sharp turn to the unexpected. That's when we laugh. You can't control it, it just happens. If you retrace your steps and explain the joke to someone who didn't get it, it isn't funny anymore.
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 -- perhaps it was never there to begin with.
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