Extemporaneous Blending: Conceptual Integration in Humorous Discourse from Talk Radio

An “Off the Leash” cartoon by W. B. Park depicts a dozen or so pigs feeding at a trough. One pig, however, has his head raised, as if addressing the approaching farmer. The pig’s words are apparently expressed in the cartoon’s caption, “Garcon!” The cartoon thus compares the farmer in the cartoon to a waiter in a French restaurant, and the viewer is left to speculate about the nature of the correspondence between expensive French food and the contents of the feeding trough. Douglas Hofstadter and Liane Gabora, pointing to the analogical nature of this joke, pose the term frame blend for a frame whose elements and relations are constructed from a combination of two frames that share some abstract structure. Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner have shown how frame blends occur in a wide variety of cognitive phenomena, and they have developed an elaborate theory of conceptual integration, or blending, to explain the representation of composite descriptions (“Conceptual Integration,” “Conceptual Projection,” Way). Previous work in this area suggests that conceptual blending plays an important role in cases of verbal humor. But whereas this earlier work has addressed conceptual integration needed to comprehend carefully crafted humorous narratives, the present study addresses blends that people use in the slightly less scripted world of talk radio. Below I provide a brief introduction to conceptual integration theory, describe its application to humorous interaction between two hosts on a radio callin show, and consider how people exploit the creative process of meaning construction in conversational interactions.