New Yorker Cartoon Editor - Cognitive Researcher

It’s a 3-year research project with their psychology department, using New Yorker cartoons to see how people process humor. My general idea is that humor shares its cognitive apparatus with 99% of other brain processes. The other 1% makes it look completely different.
We’ve started preliminary experiments. We watch with high-speed digital cameras to see where people focus their eyes while looking at a cartoon, how long it takes to understand the cartoon.
Most of our work as human beings is conceptual blending. One situation is another - that’s analogy, or even metaphor. “The moon was a ghostly galleon,” etc. Thinking that the moon is a ship - that’s blending. We do it all the time when we’re getting ideas. Let’s say I have an iPod in my hand. It’s the size of a phone. I might think, maybe it could be a phone. We do this all the time.
But in cartoons, in humor, the conceptual blends combine things most people wouldn’t think to blend. Say you imagine people getting into heaven, at Saint Peter’s Gate, but then think, what if there was a toll... a toll on a highway... maybe there’s EZPass in heaven. That’s a cartoon.