Cartoon Puzzles: The Real Intelligent Design

(Reflections on THE NEW YORKER BOOK OF CARTOON PUZZLES AND GAMES by a team of writers who call themselves "Puzzability." Foreword by Will Shortz and Robert Mankoff. Also, a report on NPR's Morning Edition about the efficacy of crossword puzzles for staving off senility. Memories of another novelty book in French "Mots De Gousses, Rames" )

If you don't believe in God, this may change your mind:

From thousands of cartoons printed in THE NEW YORKER over the decades, eight appear on pp. 116-117 of CARTOON PUZZLES AND GAMES. One word is omitted from each caption. The letters of one missing word overlap letters of the next one, and so on: waver, averages, start, tartan...and so on. That's pretty cool But arrange them in order in a grid, coiling from the outer squares to the inside, and all the letters down the middle of the grid spell the caption of a ninth cartoon.

That's what I call "intelligent design." And survival of the fittest has nothing to do with it.

When I work this puzzle, I think exactly what Will Shortz says in his introduction. (He's the NY Times' affable puzzle editor, familiar to me from years of hearing him on NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday). "I haven't just solved something, I've discovered something that's pretty. And I don't know how the people who put this together did it."

A gift from my friend Kitty Drew, this book makes me shake my head in disbelief, even while I'm laughing at cartoons and working through possible solutions to the different styles of puzzle. Shortz makes another apt observation: "When the incongruous parts of a cartoon come together, you want them to come together in a rush -- a snap. That's what produces a burst of laughter. It's the same thing with puzzles." Some of these cartoons are by Charles Addams, whose Addams Family cartoons are etched deep in my memory from around age 5.

That experience of "snap," when incongruous things suddenly fit, and when everything works vertically, horizontally, meaningfully, humorously - well, that's what you get in Bach, in Stephen Sondheim's lyrics and music, in a staging of Tom Stoppard's best plays (Arcadia, foremost). An earlier blog entry quotes Duke Ellington when he said that the "snap" (he called it "the fitting") was the same as happiness.

For me, this is evidence of God. Sure, logical positivists say that such puzzles should make me believe in the capacity of the human brain, not in a supernatural being. Fair enough. But, what on earth explains anyone's desire to put together such totally useless wonders as these?

I'm reminded of a small book I saw twenty-five years ago, apparently in French. I say apparently, because it's actually in English. Under the pretense of collecting folk lyrics from provinces in medieval France, with all the obscure imagery explained in copious footnotes, the author actually was giving the reader Mother Goose Rhymes (he called it "Mots de Gousses, Rames") with a thick French accent. For example, a poem ostensibly about a drought that reduced one apple harvest in the 14th century begins, "Pie terre, pie terre / Pommes qui n'y d'aire" ("pity earth, pity earth / apples that never reach the air"). When read aloud in French, it produces "Peter Peter Pumpkin eater." Got it? That guy didn't do it for money or popularity; few people could "get" the joke. Did it help him to propagate the species? Naw. Did he have too much time? What motivates someone to do something like that?

For me, writing music is satisfying in the same way. And, just as I don't go back to revisit crossword puzzles I've completed, I don't think often about the songs I've written -- only the next one.

In case anyone needs another reason, there's some evidence that exercising the brain in mid-life builds up a "cognitive reservoir" that ameliorates the inevitable effects of the brain's aging. Crossword puzzles, along with mentally stimulating work and continuing education (learning an instrument or a language) serve that purpose, according to a report on this morning's NPR.