Laughing Matter

Undergraduate 100D Option Studio, Spring 2017
University of California, Berkeley

Humor produces meaningful social and cultural connections. What if we could map out the ways that linguistic, cultural, and visual cues affect our understanding of a situation? Would this reveal another way to experience space, to engage with an urban context, or to develop design strategies? This studio is interested in what makes things funny, where laughter comes from, and how the social connections created through humor might be leveraged architecturally. Students are expected to take jokes very seriously, approaching the semester’s study with a social scientist’s perspective.

After a series of short investigations building knowledge about how various forms of comedy work, applying lessons learned there to small proposals for the built environment, we will focus on the pun and word play for the bulk of the semester. The conflation and the portmanteau (“bromance,” “Brexit”) here seem to lend some suggestions about how two competing but recognizable terms might merge to create a new third that is powerful for its having retained its original parts. The pun is a doubling of meaning, a layering on of content, communicating within communication, and a clue to how embedded humor might be in ordinary communication structures.