ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book is about the different ways people from a variety of fields and disciplines try to make sense of humor. Blind Men and Elephants is not meant to be a humorous book, per se, though it does have a good deal of humor in it. It utilizes the following approaches, techniques, disciplines, meta-disciplines, areas: literary theory, rhetorical theory, semiotics, communication theory, sociology, psychology, philosophy, political science, and visual aesthetics. The book presents a joke and then offer eight different interpretations of the joke, each one based on a particular discipline or perspective. It deals with Roman Jakobson's model, which involves an addresser, an addressee, coding and decoding of a message, and so forth. The book suggests that according to some communication theorists, a message has information to the extent that it has a surprise.
