10.54103/2036-461X/16912
In my previous work about film music, I had adopted Gestalt as a theoretical framework to explain the functions and effects of music in film, from a perspective that did not stem from musicology but from film studies. I developed what I call ‘micro/macro configurations’ analysis. In films, music contributes to the overall form with its specific gestalt (the configuration of the musical structures), and such musical gestalt meets the gestalt of some other cinematic device/s. Besides music, any device (light design, colour schemes, dialogue, acting, camerawork, cutting…) has a specific micro-configuration that can fuse with those of the other devices, and it can be analysed in terms of micro/macro-configuration. The product of the fusion of these micro-configurations is a macro-configuration in which the devices create an audiovisual whole that is ‘something else than the sum of its parts’. In this article I apply this Gestalt-inspired analytical approach to audiovisual humour, more specifically to ‘audiovisual puns’, ‘sight gags’, and ‘perceptual pranks’. The bulk of the examples come from the cinema of the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker trio, whose comedy is largely based on a clash of incongruous micro-configurations, on perceptual accumulation that creates results similar to multistable figures, and even on comical optical illusions. Closing the article is a proposal that links Gestalt to the Release Theories of humour, explaining the laughter engendered by humour as a ‘Aha, Ha! moment’.
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Emilio Audissino
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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Textual Film Analysis
The Aha, Ha! Moment: A Gestalt Perspective on Audiovisual Humour
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Thematic issue / Section thématique
2022-06-27
2021-12-22
2022-12-30
2022-12-30
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Cinéma & Cie
Emilio Audissino
2022/06/27
10.54103/2036-461X/16912
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Linnaeus University
2036-461X
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Textual Film Analysis
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The Aha, Ha! Moment: A Gestalt Perspective on Audiovisual Humour
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                                                                                       The Aha, Ha! Moment: A Gestalt
                                                                                       Perspective on Audiovisual Humour
                                                                                       Emilio Audissino, Linnéuniversitetet




                                                                                       In my previous work about film music, I had adopted Gestalt as a theoretical framework                        Keywords
                                                                                       to explain the functions and effects of music in film, from a perspective that did not                 Gestalt and film
                                                                                       stem from musicology but from film studies. I developed what I call ‘micro/macro
                                                                                       configurations’ analysis. In films, music contributes to the overall form with its specific
                                                                                                                                                                                                Neoformalism
                                                                                       Gestalt (the configuration of the musical structures), and such musical Gestalt meets the      Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker
                                                                                       Gestalt of some other cinematic device/s. Besides music, any device (light design, colour          Textual film analysis
                                                                                       schemes, dialogue, acting, camerawork, cutting…) has a specific micro-configuration                                 DOI
                                                                                       that can fuse with those of the other devices, and it can be analysed in terms of micro/                   10.54103/
                                                                                       macro-configuration. The product of the fusion of these micro-configurations is a macro-            2036-461X/16912
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License




                                                                                       configuration in which the devices create an audiovisual whole that is ‘something
                                                                                       else than the sum of its parts’. In this article I apply this Gestalt-inspired analytical
                                                                                       approach to audiovisual humour, more specifically to ‘audiovisual puns’, ‘sight gags’,
                                                                                       and ‘perceptual pranks’. The bulk of the examples come from the cinema of the Zucker-
                                                                                       Abrahams-Zucker trio, whose comedy is largely based on a clash of incongruous micro-
                                                                                       configurations, on perceptual accumulation that creates results similar to multistable
                                                                                       figures, and even on comical optical illusions. Closing the article is a proposal that links
                                                                                       Gestalt to the Release Theories of humour, explaining the laughter engendered by
                                                                                       humour as a ‘Aha, Ha! moment’.




                                                                                         In this article I start by surveying the contribution that Gestalt theory can
                                                                                       give to film analysis; then I present my Gestalt-inspired approach of ‘micro-
                                                                                       configuration/macro-configuration analysis’; finally, I offer a Gestalt perspective
                                                                                       on audiovisual humour. Given the film-studies oriented nature of this discussion,
                                                                                       I shall not consider ‘found humour’ — situations we can find humorous in everyday
                                                                                       life — but ‘invented humour’, which is the one we find in film comedies.1 I employ
                                                                                       the Law of Prägnanz (‘good configuration’), the Theory of Amodal Completion
                                                                                       (which stems from the Law of Good Continuation), and the Theory of Problem
                                                                                       Solving (the ‘insight’ or, perhaps more famously, the ‘Aha! Moment’), which all
                                                                                       derive from Gestalt Theory. I principally refer to the works of Wolfgang Köhler
                                                                                       and Gaetano Kanizsa, instead of Rudolf Arnheim, whose theories are already
                                                                                       more renowned in film and media studies.2 It is important to point out that this
                                                                                       article is inspired by the conceptual framework of Gestalt Theory but it has no
                                                                                       pretence to pass itself as a work pertinent to the ‘hard sciences’: its disciplinary


                                                                                       Cinéma & Cie vol. 22 no. 38 2022 · ISSN 2036-461X                                                                 97
     area is Film Studies, and its concern is the analysis of humour in films. Hence
     Gestalt is employed in looser terms than it would be in a Psychology journal.3



     GESTALT AND FILM ANALYSIS
        In 1979, the Italian Gestalt Psychologist Gaetano Kanizsa wrote: ‘today
     Gestalt theory does not have much credit as an explanatory theory’.4 In Film
     Studies too, Cognitivism has proven more popular in the last decades, at least
     as an alternative to the post-structuralist and culturalist approaches.5 Yet, the
     interest for Gestalt Theory has seen some resurgence lately, perhaps as a
     consequence of the discovery in the 1990s of the mirror neurons, whose action
     seems to resemble the ‘Psychophysical Isomorphism’ postulated by Gestaltists
     in the 1910s.6 A renewed interest has consequently emerged in film studies
     too, especially in the area of sound and music, for example in the work of K. J.
     Donnelly and Danijela Kulezic-Wilson.7
        Gestalt can provide a more holistic view of the audiovisual experience than
     the more modular view of Cognitivism.8 Often, the computer-like processing of
     perceptual data appears too central in Cognitivism, with cognition being given
     a predominant importance. Gaetano Kanizsa, in his works on visual perception,
     argued for a neater separation between the perception process and the cognition
     process, calling the two ‘primary process’ and ‘secondary process’, respectively.
     Primary process, though not exactly immediate — because ‘the organisation is not
     contained in the stimuli (even if the latter contains the conditions), but is added
     by the organism’ — is arguably more independent of cognition than Cognitivism
     would posit.9 In watching a film, for example, the perception of movement and
     the figure/ground separation would be a matter of primary processes — and not
     much cognitive processing is required — while the mental reconstruction of the
     ‘fabula’ from the ‘syuzhet’ would be a matter of secondary processes.10
        The primary process, a ‘preconscious process’, is precisely what the Gestalt
     theorists have concentrated on, and it responds to organisational rules that were
     categorised into the Gestalt laws.11 An experiment that supports the separation
     of the two processes is the ‘Ames Room Illusion’: even when one is made aware
     of the ‘trick’ behind it, the illusion is still perceived, a sign that cognition has
     little or no effect on that specific perceptual experience.12 Gestalt-oriented film
     studies have similarly advocated for a neater separation of the two processes.
     K. J. Donnelly explains:

              Stimulus recognition takes place before cognition. Unconscious
              affect always creates emotion, whereas conscious cognition
              does not necessarily do so. […] Cognitive Psychology’s notion of
              perception is that there is a small amount of stimulus and the ‘work’
              all takes place as a cognitive process in the brain. This so-called
              mental model affirms that stimulus requires the considerable
              brain input of ‘enriching’ through hypothesis-testing. […] [T]here
              are distinct aspects of the aesthetic process (for film especially)
              that are poorly accounted for by such an approach.13


98                                                      Audissino, The Aha, Ha! Moment
   Within film studies, my own work has also been influenced by Gestalt, in
particular in my research on the functions and effects of music in films.14
   From this research I developed, from Gestalt Theory, what I called ‘micro/
macro configurations’ analysis.15 In film, music contributes to the overall form
with its specific ‘Gestalt’ (the configuration of the musical melody, harmony,
timbre, etc.… is such that music is perceived as threatening, for example), and
such musical ‘Gestalt’ meets the ‘Gestalt’ of some other cinematic device/s (say,
a close-up of a smiling face).16 From the encounter of these micro-configurations
(threatening music x smiling face) a macro-configuration is produced in which
the two devices fuse to create an audiovisual whole (a ‘creepy’ person). The
‘creepiness’ configuration is neither in the image (the face is smiling) nor
in the music (the music is threatening), but it appears as the product of the
fusion of the two elements.17 This fusion responds to the Law of Prägnanz: in
the apparently incongruous pairing of these two divergent elements, our mind
searches for some sense, some stability, some meaningful relation between
the two, until an interpretation emerges — that person appears creepy because
behind the positive smiling facade some negative intent is hidden — and the
percept is thus stabilised.
   If the perception of the smiling face and the threatening music can be a matter
of ‘primary processes’, the interpretation of this apparently incongruous pairing
seems to be calling for some higher-level processing, a secondary process more
cognitive than perceptual. Yet, in keeping with Gestalt Theory, the secondary
process of film interpretation can also be theorised with Gestalt’s theory of
problem solving. In ordinary film comprehension, we usually apply ‘reproductive
thinking’, that is ‘the application of tried-and-true paths to a solution. The thinker
reproduces a series of steps that are known to yield a workable answer’.18 With
interpretation, we are faced with a problem that requires an act of ‘productive
thinking’ on our part, which is ‘characterized by shifts in perspective which allow
the problem solver to consider new, sometimes transformational, approaches’.19
If film interpretation is conceptualised as a problem-solving activity, and if a
problem is considered like an unstable configuration, then the Gestalt theory of
problem solving can be profitably used.
   According to this theory, a solution is found when the configuration of the
problematic object is made stable. To achieve this, the ‘relations’ between the
elements of the problem at hand have to be examined, we have to gain an
‘insight’: ‘we may now discover other relations in the material which make the
difficulty disappear. In some instances, we are at first unable to see any relations
in the material which are relevant to our task. When this happens, we have to
inspect the given situation until, eventually, it does exhibit relations from which
a solution can be derived’20
   Gestalt tackles problem solving not only as a secondary process, and not so
much as a cognitive effort of hypothesis-testing, but as a perceptual effort of
relation-seeking — ‘seeing relations’, ‘insight’… The problem has to be observed
from different angles until the right one is found from which we can see a relation
between the elements that can reveal a solution. This is the ‘Aha! Moment’, the


Cinéma & Cie vol. 22 no. 38 2022 · ISSN 2036-461X                                        99
      moment in which the solution to a problem presents itself to the mind: all the
      pieces fall into the right place all of a sudden because we have found the right
      angle of observation.
        Back to our example of the creepy person macro-configuration, we are
      confronted with a juxtaposition of two micro configurations (threatening music
      and smiling face) that, taken singularly and compared, are not isomorphic at
      all: reproductive thinking would expect ‘happy’ music to go with a smiling face.
      This is the interpretive problem: why the juxtaposition of these two incongruous
      elements? When we apply productive thinking and find a relation between the
      elements, a stability of the percept is reached: the two micro-configurations
      (smiling face, threatening music) reconfigure one another and a macro-
      configuration of ‘creepy person’ finally emerges. We perceive an incongruity
      between the two micro-configurations, the incongruity is made noticeable
      as a problem, which alerts us that interpretation (problem solving through
      productive thinking) is needed. When we eventually have an insight into the
      relation between the apparently incongruous micro-configurations — music
      is not incongruous: music is telling me that something threatening is hidden
      behind that smiling face — then the incongruity itself is removed and a macro-
      configuration is stabilised: arguably, a creep is about to perpetrate something
      disturbing.



      GESTALT AND AUDIOVISUAL HUMOUR
         I have used the word ‘incongruity’ to describe micro-configurations that do not
      seem to fit together. And ‘Incongruity Theory’ is precisely the principal orientation
      currently employed to explain why we experience ‘comic amusement’, the
      emotional state produced by ‘humour’ in all its forms.21 According to Incongruity
      Theory, ‘human experience works with learned patterns. […] The core meaning
      of ‘incongruity’ in standard incongruity theories is that some thing or event
      we perceive or think about violates our normal mental patterns and normal
      expectations.22 Faced with such incongruities, our mind at first turns to a state of
      alert, because any deviation from normalcy might entail a potential danger; but
      soon after, when the incongruity is assessed as a jocular and unthreatening one,
      we experience comic amusement for the humorous contestation of normalcy.
         It is cognitive psychology that has been largely employed to explain the
      mechanics of humour. Verbal comedy, in particular, has a substantial scholarly
      literature rooted in Linguistics or Cognitivism, largely falling within the
      Incongruity Theory — for example, Delia Chiaro’s Pragmatics and Descriptive
      Linguistics or Victor Raskin’s Script Theory.23 Such explanations — according to
      which humour is produced through a play with our mental scripts, schemata,
      and through a set-up that leads us to formulate false inferences that are
      then subverted by the punchline — are in line with Cognitivism’s focus on the
      secondary process, and indeed Incongruity Theory is the most popular amongst
      cognitivists.24 Yet, in the processing of visual and audiovisual humour there is



100                                                       Audissino, The Aha, Ha! Moment
arguably a stronger agency of the primary processes than in the more cognition-
driven effort of processing verbal humour, which is based on symbolic language
that needs stronger cognitive elaboration.
  Visual humour can be registered, perceived, with a higher level of immediacy
than verbal humour: if a written joke in Swedish is read by people who are
not able to enact a secondary processing of the language, the humour is not
registered at all; on the contrary, the cartoon of some pompous self-important
man spectacularly slipping on a banana peel has the potential to elicit
comic amusement trans-culturally, because it is registered through primary
processing. Hence, Gestalt can perhaps offer some complementing perspectives
on audiovisual humour, specifically applying Gestalt’s problem-solving theory.
  When we experience an instance of humour, we are presented with a problem
— an incongruous situation — and we are required to find a solution. In terms
of problem solving, there is a resemblance here between what happens with
comprehension through reproductive thinking (the approach we apply in regular
situations) and the need to apply productive thinking to something unusual.
A Gestalt-based explanation had already been given in 1932 of ‘the relevant
mental processes of the humorous experience’, an explanation that gave
perception a stronger role: the meaning of a set of elements depends on the
specific configuration of said elements; when a sudden change in configuration
is experienced — as happens in the incongruous punchline of jokes — the result
is a sudden change of meaning.25 More recent contributions directly linked the
pleasure that is experienced in solving a problem to the one experienced when
understanding a joke: both entail a ‘revelation experience’ and ‘pleasures of
the mind’ that are characterised by ‘surprise, violation of expectations and
[…] a feeling of mastery or virtuosity’.26 While most of these studies focus on
verbal jokes or the visual humour of cartoons, I shall direct my attention to the
audiovisual humour of films.
  Steve Neale and Frank Krutnik singled out some categories of comedic devices
in film and television: comic events (humorous actions that are built into larger
narratives, for example all the ludicrous troubles triggered by the rejuvenating
potion in Monkey Business (Howard Hawks, 1952); gags (isolated humorous
moments in the ‘field of visual, physical action’); jokes and wisecracks (isolated
humorous events and actions that ‘imply a control of language’), and, within
the latter, visual puns (‘one of the forms taken by the comic interplay between
language and action’).27 Here, I leave aside the comic events and the jokes and
wisecracks and concentrate on the gag and the visual pun.
  The gag is also known as ‘sight gag’, which in films often ‘derives from
exploiting the magical properties of cinema, a comedy of metaphysical release
that celebrates the possibility of substituting the laws of physics with the laws
of the imagination.’28 A classic example of such ‘comedy of metaphysical release’
is the delivery man in Hellzapoppin’ (H.C. Potter, 1941) who is recurrently seen
trying to deliver a potted plant to one Mrs. Jones in the most absurd situations
— always unsuccessfully. Moreover, every time he appears, the plant has grown
in size, and in the later attempts it has reached the dimension of a tree. The


Cinéma & Cie vol. 22 no. 38 2022 · ISSN 2036-461X                                    101
      recurring gag has the core of its humour in the sight of the paradoxical rate
      of growth of the plant and of the delivery man’s increasing exasperation and
      fatigue for carrying around the item.
         The visual pun consists in a humorous play with double-meanings and the
      ambiguities of language, like the verbal pun, but it is realised in the visual
      domain.29 An oft-cited example is in Horse Feathers (Norman Z. McLeod, 1932)
      where Groucho Marx, president of a university, inspects an official document
      before signing it. He stops, alarmed, ‘Wait a minute there’s no seal here. Where’s
      the seal?’. And Harpo, promptly, brings in a sea seal instead of the expected
      piece of stationery. Though Maltin’s coinage of ‘visual pun’ for this example
      is justified by the fact that this is a pun whose punchline takes place visually,
      I think that audiovisual pun is a fitter qualification. The pun works by means
      of one visual and one aural element, and it works only because the two are
      fused together. The visual micro-configuration (Harpo bringing in a sea seal),
      though certainly bizarre, is not per se humorous. The aural micro-configuration
      is not humorous at all (a character asks for a stamp). It is the fusion of the two
      that creates a humorous macro-configuration. Whereas the traditional pun is a
      wordplay in which the comic effect is produced by a double meaning within the
      same sensory modality — ‘All calendar’s days are numbered’ — in audiovisual
      puns the verbal part typically functions as a first leg of the joke (set-up) while
      the second leg (pay-off) is offered visually.
         Film comedy typically employs the visual and aural modalities in combination
      to produce humour. Even in sight gags, sound constitutes an important micro-
      configuration: consider the various gags about music shifting from the non-
      diegetic to the diegetic level — what Biancorosso calls ‘epistemological jokes’.30
      Viewers are tricked into believing that music is non-diegetic (coming from
      outside the narrative world) but then they suddenly realise it is in fact diegetic (it
      comes from some source within the story-world). A classic example is from Mel
      Brooks’s Blazing Saddles (1974). We see the sheriff riding his horse in the prairie
      to the sound of Count Basie’s ‘April in Paris’ — a choice that is per se already
      incongruous with the western-film setting, but motivated by the incongruous
      designer’s saddle sported by the sheriff. Yet, as the camera pans to follow
      the horse ride, we discover that Count Basie and his orchestra are actually
      there, playing the music from a stage incongruously placed in the middle of the
      prairie. The music we assessed as non-diegetic accompaniment (following the
      patterns of reproductive thinking as per our film-viewers’ experience) is actually
      a diegetic performance.31 Both modalities are actively involved in the production
      of the gag’s macro-configuration: the aural micro-configuration (Basie’s song)
      and the visual micro-configuration (the sheriff meeting the orchestra in the
      prairie). If this had been a silent film, we would have had the surprise of finding
      an orchestra in the middle of nowhere, but the non-diegetic/diegetic humorous
      trickery is made possible precisely by the audiovisual fusion. Like this, a sizable
      number of sight gags involve an aural component, and they are based on some
      trickery of our perception, not only of our mental schemata and scripts: first we
      perceive the music as non-diegetic, and then the perception is suddenly shifted



102                                                       Audissino, The Aha, Ha! Moment
to another angle — diegetic.
   Observed from this perception-oriented angle, audiovisual humour of this kind
is similar to multistable images, in which ‘sensory information is ambiguous and
consistent with two or more mutually exclusive interpretations’.32 The Duck/
Rabbit, the Old Lady/Young Maid, or the Rubin Vase are famous examples:
‘such figures provide the experience of looking at a constant external stimulus
whose perceptual appearance changes from one viewing to the next, or indeed
from one moment to the next in continuous viewing’.33 In such figures, two co-
existing sets of stimuli are juxtaposed, liable to be arranged into two or more
different macro-configurations; we try to stabilise one macro-configuration,
but that macro-configuration would not really stabilise, some tension remains,
something unusual is perceived in the image. Then, we eventually ‘solve the
problem’ by noticing, from another angle, that there is another relation between
the micro-configuration sets of stimuli.
   The reaction when we are presented with a multistable figure and we realise
the trick it plays on our perception, can be one of smile and comic amusement.
An example of such effect produced by this multistability — at least on me — is
a particular version of the Rubin Vase.34 It is not a drawing but a photorealistic
rendering of a vase with the British royal family crest on it. At first, I see the
vase, and that seems the way the macro-configuration is stabilised. But there
is something weird about this vase: it is asymmetrical and odd-shaped, it does
not conform to the Law of Good Form — nor to basic standards of good pottery.
By inspecting the vase for solutions to the oddity, the perception suddenly flips
to another side: now the profiles of Queen Elisabeth and Prince Philip can be
seen, which explains the odd contours of the vase. A new macro-configuration is
reached in which what I perceive is not a slovenly shaped vase but a humorous
homage to the Royal couple.
   Kanizsa studied other types of optical illusions, the so-called ‘impossible
figures’, like Penrose’s triangle or fork.35 He too detected reactions of comic
amusement when people were confronted with such odd images. Kanizsa, also
a painter, discussed some of his works in which he created configurations that
can be obtained in the bidimensional world of the canvas but that would be
impossible in the tridimensional world of real life — as happens in Escher’s
lithographies. In Kanizsa’s paintings, the absurd effects are produced by
confusing our perception about the distinction between figure and ground
through the flatness of bidimentionality, the juxtaposition of bright and dark
areas, and a play between thick and thin elements, cues which all tend to be
configured automatically, driven by the primary-process Gestalt laws. The result
is that elements of the characters in the foreground seem to absurdly fuse or
intersect with the objects or characters in the background: ‘The fishing rod is
thinner than the sail, so it is “forced” to pass behind […], the fencer’s sword
pierces the referee several meters away, the umbrella is threaded through the
girl’s hair, and the man and the woman are strangely entangled in the fence.
All these figures seem absurd’.36 These absurd paintings suggest ‘a humorous
effect to the observer’; the first impression is one ‘of oddity and absurdity,


Cinéma & Cie vol. 22 no. 38 2022 · ISSN 2036-461X                                    103
      because the effect is both unexpected on the basis of everyday experience and
      in conflict with the perspective information on depth given by the figure’ and
      one can also notice ‘the surprise of the observers and their saying, as they did
      in the case of the fisherman and of the fencer, that there must be some mistake
      in the picture’.37
         Audiovisual gags like Count Basie in the prairie function somewhat like
      multistable figures: we first see something and then suddenly our perception is
      flipped to something else, and when we realise the trickery at the base of the
      image, we experience amusement.38 Apart from the amusement for the sudden
      switch of perspective, multistable figure-like humour can also derive from the
      perception of the presence at the same time of two contrasting configurations
      — like in the Old Lady/Young Maid image. For instance, the humour might lie in
      the contrast between one serious micro-configuration and one ridiculous micro-
      configuration: in the same macro-configuration we have two different sides, as
      in a multistable image. The oeuvre of David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry
      Zucker is exemplarily replete with gags based on this multistable ‘audiovisual
      disjunction’.39
         One gag in ZAZ’s TV show Police Squad! (S01xE05, 1982) sees Lieutenant
      Frank Drebin — in an undercover mission — paying a visit to a mob chieftain
      in his office. As customary after the James Bond films, the stereotypical villain
      is at his desk, cuddling a white cat on his lap. As the dialogue proceeds on
      serious tones, the mobster puts the cat away by sticking it inside one of the
      desk-drawers, and then opens another drawer to grab a gun, but we can peek a
      white toy poodle inside this other drawer. As these animal gags run, the tone of
      the dialogue is threatening and confrontational, and the music too accompanies
      it in a serious mood. Moments later, the mobster opens a file cabinet to put in
      a document while he assigns to Drebin — who pretends to be wanting to join
      the crime organisation — a murder as an initiation test. The music punctuates
      the words ‘I want you to kill him’ with a dramatic figure of the trombones, but
      as the mobster opens the file cabinet, doves fly out of it, continuing the series
      of stored-animals gags. If we hear only, the scene seems to belong to the
      drama genre; if we watch only, it clearly belongs to the comedy genre. The
      humorous macro-configuration is produced by the multistable tension of the
      two contrasting micro-configurations.
         If we consider audiovisual puns, these are not only interpretable in terms of
      multistability — the flipping from one meaning to another — but they have also
      a component of trickery played upon our ‘amodal completion’ processes, that
      is one of the two modalities through which we interpolate non-visible parts to
      create a good form and stable configuration in our percepts. In Kanizsa’s words:

               we have phenomena of totalization, of completion, of integration,
               of ‘filling in the gaps’ — that is, of making present what is absent.
               The interpolation in the primary process can be modal or amodal.
               Examples of modal completion are […] the formation of anomalous
               contours and surfaces. In all these cases the filled-in parts have the
               characteristics of visual modality [...]. Much more numerous are the


104                                                     Audissino, The Aha, Ha! Moment
         cases of amodal completion. By ‘amodal presence’ we mean that
         type of perceptual existence […] that is not verified by any sensory
         modality. […] One need only recall the fundamental fact of figure-
         ground segmentation in the construction of the phenomenal world,
         in which the articulation always implies the completion (precisely
         amodal) of the continuous background existing behind the figure.40

   Audiovisual puns play with our tendency to anticipate the continuation of an
event, to fill the gaps according to the normal expectations that reproductive
thinking suggests us. We perform an amodal completion of elements that we
suppose are going to come next, even if evidence of this has not been ostensibly
presented yet by any modality. In the case of the Marx Brothers’ seal audiovisual
pun, the normal amodal completion suggested by reproductive thinking — how
we mentally see the event progressing — is the anticipation of an office seal
to appear soon; instead, something else appears, which is not in line with the
prediction.41
   In Police Squad! again we have a number of such instances. For example,
in one episode (S01xE04), Hocken and Drebin pay a visit to a night-club to
question the resident starlet. They found her in the dressing room, with the
scant costume still on. As they talk, she asks, ‘Do you mind if I change’ and then
moves behind a dressing screen. Presently, she comes out as a totally different
actress, a complete change, not a tall red-head but a petite blonde. Despite
the absurd twist, the conversation continues undisturbed, as per the style of
Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker [fig. 1].
   A less evident audiovisual puns is in ZAZ’s Top Secrets! (1984): at a performance
of Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker (1892) we see the male dancers sporting
exceptionally prominent crotch bumps in their leotards; as they stand in line,
the female dancers leap in the air and continue dancing by stepping on the
male anatomical protrusions — a veritable ‘nutcracker’ ballet, for those who
recognise the title of the musical piece.
   There are cases of sight gags that are specifically based on tricks played
on our perception. These ‘perceptual pranks’ are abundant in the cinema of
Jacques Tati and of Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker.42 In both, the comedic style
is typically based on a play with the viewer’s perception — not only through off-
centred, background, or multi-layered gags — but also through veritable optical
illusions. A Tati example from Play Time (1967) is the doorman who bends
down to open the floor latches of a large glass door, and in doing so the ornate
handles of the door gets superimposed to his head and look like a massive pair
of antlers. Tati’s films are an examples of ‘parametric cinema’ which ‘exploits
the very limits of the viewer’s capacity’.43 Also, ‘the strongly parametric film,
in departing from the classical system, must create a degree of perceptual
uncertainty’.44 While in classical cinema we can rely on reproductive thinking,
with parametric cinema we have to resort to productive thinking to solve the
perceptual challenges, like when we are faced with humour. Comedies in the
parametric style are thus most interesting from a Gestalt perspective.
   Within the ‘nonsensical accumulation’ typical of ZAZ’s works, we find numerous


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Fig. 1:
‘Do you mind if I
change?’, from Police
Squad! (David Zucker,
Jim Abrahams, Jerry
Zucker, 1982), Episode 4




                           perceptual pranks at the expense of the viewers.45 A particularly rich repository
                           is Top Secret!. A striking instance of an articulate and technically complex
                           perceptual prank is the Swedish bookstore scene, which I have analysed
                           elsewhere.46 Another is the departing train station: the protagonist is sitting
                           in a train that has just stopped at a station. We hear the whistle signal, the
                           engine warms up, and we see, from inside the wagon, that the train is leaving
                           the station… until we realise that it is actually the station that is leaving the
                           train. The false movement is confirmed when the narration cuts to the exterior
                           of the wagon and we see the station, bizarrely mounted on a wheeled platform,
                           departing from the stationary train — to add more absurdism, a late-coming
                           passenger chases the travelling station.
                             Other gags in Top Secret! deceive the viewer by playing on the flatness of the
                           bidimensional film image, in a way similar to Kanizsa’s paintings. As the leader
                           of the underground fighters is observing through binoculars the meadow in
                           front of the prison they are about to infiltrate, we cut to a point-of-view shot:
                           we see the typical reverse-eight-shaped black matte of binoculars framing the
                           meadow, in which some cows are roaming. Suddenly, the cows jump over the
                           black matte as if it were a fence, tilting our perception of the different planes of



106                                                                           Audissino, The Aha, Ha! Moment
the space, as in a trompe-l’oeil [fig. 2].
  In another scene, the perceptual prank is played through forced perspective
— the same trick used to make objects or people look bigger or smaller
depending on their position between the camera and the set, a sort of Ames




                                                                                Fig. 2:
                                                                                Trespassing Cows,
                                                                                from Top Secret! (David
                                                                                Zucker, Jim Abrahams,
                                                                                Jerry Zucker, 1984)



Cinéma & Cie vol. 22 no. 38 2022 · ISSN 2036-461X                                                107
                         room, as employed in Darby O’ Gill and the Little People (Robert Stevenson,
                         1959).47 The scene starts with a phone ringing in a large salon with people in
                         the background. The phone is very close to the camera and appears magnified
                         because of its placement. The East-Germany commander walks to the phone to




Fig. 3:
Big Phone, from Top
Secret! (David Zucker,
Jim Abrahams, Jerry
Zucker, 1984)



108                                                                     Audissino, The Aha, Ha! Moment
                                                                                   Fig. 4:
                                                                                   Boots, from Top
                                                                                   Secret! (David Zucker,
                                                                                   Jim Abrahams, Jerry
                                                                                   Zucker, 1984)




picks it up, and as he walks our perception changes: we realise that the phone
is actually oversized [fig. 3].
  Perceptual amodal completion is at the base of other gags. The East-Germany
commander is seen reading a book in his office, his boots lying on the desk. We
are distracted by the book’s title: ‘Hermann Goering’s Workout Book’, and we
are led to think that this is the sight gag here. When the attendant enters the
office, the commander stands up and his boots keep staying on the desk: they
were fake boots, disconnected from his body. At the sight of boots on a desk
and a person behind it, we amodally complete the image by filling in the missing
parts — we see boots, we see a person, we connect the boots with the person,
imagining legs that we do not actually see, as per the Law of Good Continuation.
These gags make fun of our routinised perception: do not presume the presence
of legs only because you see boots! [fig. 4]
  In a later scene, the protagonists knock at the door of the underground-
movement headquarters. A little sliding window opens on the very top of the
door and a man peeks outside suspiciously, asking for the password. Given
the high position of his head, we prepare ourselves to see an abnormally tall
person. As the newcomers provide the correct password, the door is open… to


Cinéma & Cie vol. 22 no. 38 2022 · ISSN 2036-461X                                                    109
                         reveal that the peeking man was in fact a ‘little person’, evidently standing on a
                         high stool. Because of our routinary amodal completion process, we imagined a
                         person as tall as the door window, filling the non-visible parts supposed to lead
                         up to the visible head [fig. 5].
                           The types of sight gags that can be called perceptual pranks are not as




Fig. 5:
Tall/short, from Top
Secret! (David Zucker,
Jim Abrahams, Jerry
Zucker, 1984)



110                                                                        Audissino, The Aha, Ha! Moment
common as audiovisual puns and the ‘regular’ sight gags, but when one finds
them, these are ideal for the application of Gestalt, because they rely more on
the primary process than on the secondary process: they do not disrupt our
knowledge of norms and conventions; they disrupt our perception.



THE ‘AHA, HA! MOMENT’
  As a conclusion, an important question of Humour Theory might be tackled,
even if only tentatively: Why we often laugh when faced with audiovisual humour,
multistable figures, or perceptual pranks? In the case of the Royal Couple
Vase, the first reaction is one of weirdness, and weirdness can be a threat to
normalcy and stableness, so we muster psychic energies to solve the problem.
When the weirdness is found to be innocuous and deliberately created to play
on our perception, then a re-configuration of the energies happens and comic
amusement is the effect of this sudden mental switch. This comic amusement
might produce the physical reaction of a smile or even a burst of laughter. Why?
  Release Theories concentrated on this: What is laughter? This is admittedly
‘something left unexplained by the […] Incongruity Theories’.48 The Incongruity
Theories focus on the mental processes, and the psychic reward is a ‘mental
pleasure’ similar to the one gained from solving puzzles, ‘but when we engage
in genuine puzzle solving […] we aim at discovering the right answers and take
pleasure in that, whereas with things such as jokes, we are happy — really
happy — with the wrong answers’, notes Noël Carroll.49 From the angle of
Release Theories, the physical reward is the pleasure deriving from a discharge
of pent-up energy.
  Release Theories posit that laughter is a discharge of energy: when we are
confronted with a puzzling situation, we muster psychic energies to face the
potential problem, and when we realise that the puzzling situation is nothing
serious, then the accumulated energy is released in the form of the laughter.
Quoting John Dewey, Morreall succinctly expresses the point: ‘the laugh is
thus a phenomenon of the same general kind as the sigh of relief’.50 In Gestalt
terms, an energy pattern in the brain is suddenly reconfigured into a different
one. When the new macro-configuration stabilises, the sudden switch from one
macro-configuration to the other creates a release of the energy summoned for
the problem-solving effort. A burst of laughter ensues: it is a type of problem
solving in which we experience a ‘Aha, Ha! Moment’.
  Release Theories are largely dismissed nowadays because of the mental
model they posit, ‘based on an outdated hydraulic theory of the mind’,51 and
they have a ‘tendency […] to proliferate unwarranted mental entities and/or
processes’.52 The critique about ‘outdated theories of the mind’ and ‘unwarranted
mental processes’ reminds of the principal critique against Gestalt theory, and
specifically against the already-mentioned psychophysical isomorphism.53
The cognitive psychologist Alan J. Parkin sums it up in these words: ‘While
Gestalt demonstrations are very powerful, the theory that went along with them


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      was rather weak. […] Their principal idea was that of isomorphism, in which a
      particular Gestalt was thought to set up a corresponding electrical force in the
      brain which served as the basis for perception’.54
         The energy fields that flow in the brain posited by Gestalt’s psychophysical
      isomorphism might look, to the contemporary eye, quite similar to the ‘hydraulic’
      theory of the mind on which the Release Theories are based. Energy patterns
      in the brain are triggered and shaped in specific ways by the external stimuli,
      and the configuration of such energy patterns in our brain determines the
      configuration in which the stimuli are organised into shapes and objects in our
      resulting perception. In his ‘maluma/takete’ experiment, Köhler demonstrated
      that the perception of a ‘Roundness’ Gestalt is share by both a round figure and
      the non-word ‘maluma’, and the perception of a ‘Sharpness’ Gestalt is shared
      by a spiky and angular figure and the non-word ‘takete’.55 Both image and
      sound are perceived as curvy or spiky, respectively. Apparently, certain stimuli,
      whether visual or aural, activate the same energy patterns in the brain, and
      such energy patterns produce the same specific perception in either modality.
      The Gestaltists could never demonstrate this theory convincingly. Yet, the way
      in which we react to multistable figures seems to suggest that there seems to be
      some sudden switch in perception that has little or nothing to do with cognition,
      exactly like an energy field that suddenly changes configuration: when we flip
      from one configuration to the other, there is like a mental ‘click’ that commutates
      the configurations. Indeed, some current neurological studies explain the shifts
      in multistable perception on the ground of ‘perceptual alternations [that] derive
      from the autonomous oscillations of a circuit within the visual areas’.56
         It is not my intention here to defend psychophysical isomorphism or outdated
      ‘hydraulic’ views of the mind but to submit that it would be perhaps enriching to
      integrate the Incongruity Theory with the Release Theory, to explain the ‘Aha, Ha!
      Moment’ as a sort of tickling of our brain induced by the sudden shift of energy
      fields. I am not the first one to propose such integration. For example, an attempt
      to reconsider Release Theory from a cognitivist’s perspective was made by Noël
      Carroll: ‘when presented with an anomaly — such as the punchline of a joke —
      one is affronted with a challenge, an incongruity which may be appraised as
      threatening, annoying, in need of a solution, or amusing, the difficulty is removed.
      From being primed for effort, a sense of effortlessness, ease, and relaxation
      ensues. An initial intuition that something is being demanded of us disappears,
      resulting in relief’.57 We do not have to worry about finding a solution for the
      anomaly because the anomaly is there just for fun, and hence we experience
      a ‘mental experience of being unburdened cognitively’.58 What I propose here
      is an approach to audiovisual humour that employs Gestalt Theory not only as
      an analytical tool but also as a sort of Release Theory, to be integrated to the
      more diffused approaches based on Cognitivism and Incongruity Theory. As in
      the case of film music in my previous works, I see Gestalt as a fruitful addition
      that can add new implements to our film-analysis toolbox. Instead of discarding
      tools because of their supposed obsolescence or because of current fads in the
      academe, it is more productive to enlarge the set of tools at our disposal.



112                                                      Audissino, The Aha, Ha! Moment
  Moreover, the more resources we can mobilise to study humour, the better it
is, given humour’s centrality in our lives and its socio-cultural importance. Not
dissimilarly to multistable and impossible/unthinkable figures, humour often
constitute a challenge not only to our normal understanding of things — ‘to
disrupt the heuristics we deploy in everyday life’ and to single out the ‘cognitive
bugs’59 — but also to our normal perception of things. Besides procuring us
comic amusement, humour has also a central function as a ‘source of social
information about the norms that govern the culture we inhabit’ because it ‘alerts
us to the relevant social norms and serve to reinforce them. […] In some cases,
humour may even function to enforce norms — to serve as a corrective’.60 By
contravening the expected results and disrupting the norms, humour highlights
those norms and expectations that are often so common that become invisible
to us in everyday life.
  This social function of making us look at everyday life from another perspective
is also the key social function of all the arts according to the Russian Formalists.
As explained by Kristin Thompson:

         Art is set apart from the everyday world, in which we use our
         perception for practical ends. We perceive the world so as to
         filter from it those elements that are relevant to our immediate
         actions. […] Films and other artworks, on the contrary, plunge us
         into a non-practical, playful type of interaction. They renew our
         perceptions and other mental processes because they hold no
         immediate practical implications for us. […] The nature of practical
         perception means that our faculties become dulled by the repetitive
         and habitual activities inherent in much of daily life. Thus art, by
         renewing our perceptions and thoughts, may be said to act as a
         sort of mental exercise, parallel to the way sports is an exercise
         for the body.61

  As Viktor Shklovsky puts it, ‘as perception becomes habitual, it becomes
automatic’ and ‘habitualization devours work, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and
the fear of war. And Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it
exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony’.62 What Art does is
‘defamiliarise’ the world for us, making our perception of it ‘roughened’ so that
habitualisation and automatisms are removed and we can appreciate the world
anew. By aesthetically transforming the ‘materials’ of the world and making
fun of them, humour too operates such defamiliarisation and constitutes an
indispensable instrument not only for the cognitive consolidation of the societal
cultural norms but also to ‘break the glass armour of familiarity’ of our routinised
perception.




Cinéma & Cie vol. 22 no. 38 2022 · ISSN 2036-461X                                      113
Notes
 1
    Noël Carroll, Humour (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 37.
 2
    For example, Meraj Dhir, ‘A Gestalt Approach to Film Analysis’, in Arnheim for Film and Media Studies,
ed. by Scott Higgins (New York: Routledge, 2011), 89–106.
  3
     I would like to thank the editors of this issue and one of the two anonymous peer-reviewers for their
constructive criticism and suggestions.
  4
    Gaetano Kanizsa, Organization in Vision: Essays on Gestalt Perception (New York: Praeger, 1979), 3.
  5
     See Gregory Currie, ‘Cognitivism’, in A Companion to Film Theory, ed. by Toby Miller and Robert Stam
(Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 105–122.
  6
    Psychophysical Isomorphism is a central, though controversial, tenet of Gestalt, according to which the
energy patterns in the brain configure in such a way that a correspondence exists between the perceptual
phenomena and the mental processes — more on this below. On Psychophysical Isomorphism, see Abraham
S. Luchins and Edith H. Luchins. ‘Isomorphism in Gestalt theory: Comparison of Wertheimer’s and Kohler’s
concepts’, Gestalt Theory, 21.3 (1999), 208–234. On ‘mirror neurons’ — neurons that fires both when an
action is performed and when the same action is merely observed — see Giacomo Rizzolatti, Luciano Fadiga,
Leonardo Fogassi and Vittorio Gallese, ‘Resonance Behaviors and Mirror Neurons’, Archives italiennes de
biologie, 137.2 (1999), 85–100. The relation between the two is surveyed, for example, in Morris N. Eagle
and Jerome C. Wakefield, ‘Gestalt Psychology and the Mirror Neuron Discovery’, Gestalt Theory, 29.1 (2007),
59–64, and Carmelo Calì, ‘Isomorphism and Mirror Neurons’, Gestalt Theory, 29.2 (2007), 168–173.
  7
    Danijela Kulezic-Wilson, The Musicality of Narrative Film (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015).
  8
     Cognitivism, more than a ‘specific theory’, has been called a ‘program’ for the difficulty to establish a
unity of and general consensus on the doctrines at its base: see Currie, 106.
  9
    Kanizsa, Organization in Vision: Essays on Gestalt Perception (New York: Praeger, 1979), 5.
  10
      On fabula and syuzhet in films, see David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison, WI: University
of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 49–62.
  11
      Ibidem, 3.
  12
      Kanizsa, 4.
  13
       Kevin J. Donnelly, Occult Aesthetics: Synchronization in Sound Film (Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press, 2014), 18–19.
  14
       Emilio Audissino, Film/Music Analysis. A Film Studies Approach (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2017).
  15
      Audissino, ‘A Gestalt Approach to the Analysis of Music in Films’, Musicology Research, 2.1 (2017), 69–88.
  16
      The word ‘gestalt’ is sometimes translated as ‘form’ but I see this as potentially confusing with the
more vague concept of ‘form’ that is used in everyday parlance — the outer aspect of something, or the
‘vehicle’ of contents in the form/content-split discourses — or the ‘form’ as used in formalist approaches. I
employ the term ‘configuration’ to translate Gestalt’s specific concept of a dynamic process of organisation
and reciprocal relation amongst the parts of a system. This distinction is also essential to clarify that I do
not claim that the overall form of a film should be equated to the concept of ‘gestalt’: the film has its own
formal system (in formalist terms) and to analyse the functions and effects of the devices within the film
form, I employ the Gestalt-inspired micro-configuration/macro-configuration method to study the function
and effect of the single device at hand.
  17
       This type of fusion is similar to the ‘widow concept’ discussed by Sergei Eisenstein in The Film
Sense, trans. and ed. by Jay Leda (New York: Meridian Books, 1957), 7–8. The Kuleshov effect can also
be interpreted as two micro-configurations (Close-Up of Mozhukhin observing something x Detail Shot of
the observed object/person) producing a novel macro-configuration: Mozhukhin is hungry; Mozhukhin is
mournful; Mozhukhin is lustful. On the Kuleshov Effect, see Kuleshov on Film: Writings of Lev Kuleshov ed.
by Ronald Levaco (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974), 200.
  18
      Ronald T. Kellogg, Fundamentals of Cognitive Psychology (Los Angeles and London: Sage, 2012), 246.
  19
      J. Burton Cunningham and James N. MacGregor, ‘Productive and Re-productive Thinking in Solving
Insight Problems’, Journal of Creative Behavior, 48 (2014), 44–63. While they are often considered synonyms
in the post-structuralist or culturalist approaches, where films are ‘read’, I distinguish ‘film analysis’ —
which also considers ‘film comprehension’ — from ‘film interpretation’: ‘interpretation is only one part of



114                                                                             Audissino, The Aha, Ha! Moment
analysis’, Kristin Thompson, Breaking the Glass Armor: Neoformalist Film Analysis (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1988), 34n25.
  20
     Wolfgang Köhler, The Task of Gestalt Psychology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 143–
144, 147–153.
  21
     Carroll, Humour, 4.
  22
      John Morreall, Comic Relief: A Comprehensive Philosophy of Humor (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell,
2009), 10–11.
  23
     Victor Raskin, Semantic Mechanisms of Humor (Dordrecht, Boston and Lancaster: D. Reidel, 1985); Delia
Chiaro, The Language of Jokes: Analyzing Verbal Play (New York: Routledge, 2006).
  24
     Carroll defends it as ‘the most fruitful’, after having traced the deficiencies of the competing theories —
Carroll, Humour, 8.
  25
     Norman R. F. Maier, ‘A Gestalt Theory of Humour’, British Journal of Psychology, 23 (1932), 69–74 (69).
  26
     Ivana Bianchi, Erika Branchini, Carla Canestrari and Roberto Burro, ‘On Pleasures of the Mind Related
to Humour and Insight Problem Solving: An Investigation of People’s Awareness of What They Like and
Why’, Journal of Cognitive Psychology (2022) <doi: 10.1080/20445911.2022.2047058>. Other articles in the
past had already connected insight and problem solving with humour: for example, Ori Amir and others,
‘Ha Ha! Versus Aha! A Direct Comparison of Humor to Nonhumorous Insight for Determining the Neural
Correlates of Mirth’, Cerebral Cortex, 25.5 (2015), 1405–1413, and Aaron Kozbelt and Kana Nishioka, ‘Humor
Comprehension, Humor Production, and Insight: An Exploratory Study’, Humor — International Journal of
Humor Research, 23.3 (2010), 375–401.
  27
     Steve Neale and Frank Krutnik, Popular Film and Television Comedy (New York and London: Routledge,
1990), 48–51.
  28
     Carroll, ‘Notes on the Sight Gag’, in Id., Theorizing the Moving Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1996), 146.
  29
     Leonard Maltin, Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons (New York: New American
Library, 1987), 291.
  30
     Giorgio Biancorosso, ‘The Harpist in the Closet: Film Music as Epistemological Joke’, Music and the
Moving Image, 2.3 (2009), 11–33.
  31
     The scene is analysed in terms of ‘syn-diegetic perspective’ in Emile Wennekes, ‘Out of Tune? Jazz,
Film and The Diegesis’, in Cinema Changes: Incorporations of Jazz in the Film Soundtrack, ed. by Emile
Wennekes and Emilio Audissino (Turnhout: Brepols, 2019), 3–18 (12–14).
  32
     Philipp Sterzer, Andreas Kleinschmidt and Geraint Rees, ‘The Neural Bases of Multistable Perception’,
Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 13.7 (2009), 310–318 (310).
  33
     Andrew J. Parker and Kristine Krug, ‘Neuronal Mechanisms for the Perception of Ambiguous Stimuli’,
Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 13.4 (2003), 433–439 (433).
  34
     Reproduced in Benjamin B. Lahey, Psychology: An Introduction (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2012), 148.
  35
     Kanizsa, 21–22.
  36
     Ibidem, 41.
  37
     Ibidem, 41–45.
  38
     Multistability has been employed elsewhere to study verbal and visual comedy: for example, respectively,
Daniel Kjellander, ‘Gold Punning: Studying Multistable Meaning Structures Using a Systematically Collected
Set of Lexical Blends’, Lexis Journal in English Lexicology, 14 (2019), 1–28; Karin Kukkonen, ‘Adventures in
Duck-Rabbitry: Multistable Elements of Graphic Narrative’, Narrative, 25.3 (2017), 342–358.
  39
      On Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker, see Audissino, ‘New Hollywood’s “Zany Godards”: A “Shirley” Serious
Assessment of Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker’, in New Wave, New Hollywood: Gender, Reassessment, Recovery
and Legacy, ed. by Nathan Abrams and Gregory Frame (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), 79–100, and
Audissino, ‘Police Squad!. The Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker Style VS the Substance of Traditional Television’,
in Substance/Style: Moments in Television, ed. by Sarah Cardwell, Lucy Donaldson and Jonathan Bignell
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022), 178–201.
  40
     Kanizsa, 6.
  41
      Of course, one might argue that, since we are dealing with a Marx Brothers film, expectations are
oriented towards abnormality rather than normality, so the appearance of the sea seal might not be
entirely unexpected. Nevertheless, the humorous effect is produced precisely because the normal amodal
completion of the event constitutes the term of reference that anchors our perception of abnormality in the


Cinéma & Cie vol. 22 no. 38 2022 · ISSN 2036-461X                                                       115
deviant development of the scene.
  42
     ZAZ and Tati are compared in Audissino, ‘Police Squad!’, 186–187.
  43
     Bordwell, 306.
  44
     Thompson, 251.
  45
     The comedic mechanics of non-sensical accumulation are exemplified in Audissino, ‘New Hollywood’s
“Zany Godards”’, 86.
  46
     Ibidem, 95.
  47
     Fiona M. C. Dorward and Ross H. Day, ‘Loss of 3-D Shape Constancy in Interior Spaces: The Basis of the
Ames-Room Illusion’, Perception, 26.6 (1997), 707–718.
  48
     Morreall, 16.
  49
     Carroll, Humour, 36.
  50
     Quoted in Morreall, 17.
  51
     Morreall, 23.
  52
     Carroll, Humour, 41.
  53
     Some of the misunderstandings of Gestalt Theory are discussed in Riccardo Luccio, ‘Gestalt Psychology
and Cognitive Psychology’, Humana Mente, 17 (July 2011), 67–128.
  54
     Alan J. Parkin, Essential Cognitive Psychology (Hove and New York: Psychology Press, 2000), 7.
  55
     Köhler, Gestalt Psychology: The Definitive Statement of the Gestalt Theory (New York: Liveright, 1947),
224–225.
  56
      David A. Leopold and Nikos K. Logothetis, ‘Multistable Phenomena: Changing Views in Perception’,
Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 3.7 (1999), 254–264 (254).
  57
     Carroll, Humour, 41.
  58
     Ibidem.
  59
     Ibidem, 70.
  60
     Ibidem, 76.
  61
     Thompson, 8–9.
  62
     Quoted in ibidem, 10.




116                                                                          Audissino, The Aha, Ha! Moment
