Now, where were we—actually, where was I? It’s hard enough keeping track of my own doings without having to worry about you.

Ah, yes. Last week, I opened the Pandora’s box of the “Seinfeld” New Yorker-cartoon episode and out popped a cute kitty to explain humor. Not leaving well enough alone, I added my own hydra-headed musings on what’s funny and why. And not having enough sense to quit when I’m behind, I now return to the episode to bravely bloviate on.

When last we left Elaine, the cartoon editor’s flattery had inspired her inner cartoonist. Let’s pick it up there.

When Jerry doesn’t accede to the gemlike quality of the cartoon, Elaine presses on, trying to explain its lustre. This scene is a role reversal from when Elinoff, the New Yorker cartoon editor, was attempting to explain a cartoon to her.

Let’s see if Elaine does any better.

At first, Elaine defends the cartoon with the incongruity justification, saying that the pig’s complaint is “not normal.” That’s absolutely true on many levels. First off, pigs are notorious non-complainers. They may not be as content as cows, but there is the expression “Happy as a pig in Vorshtein.” Got you on that one, didn’t I? You were expecting some other word, and “Vorshtein” was surprising and incongruous in that context, just as it was when Elinoff used it as a category of humor.

Most people would agree that humor involves an idea, image, or text that is in some sense incongruous, unusual, unexpected, surprising, or, as Elaine says, “not normal.” But “not normal” is not enough, even when there is lots of non-normalcy, as in Elaine’s cartoon. To wit: pigs don’t complain, and if they did, it wouldn’t be about their height, and even then, it wouldn’t be in a department store. So we have incongruity raised to the third power, but still no joke. Incongruity may be a necessary condition for humor, but alone it’s not sufficient. The different frames of reference have to be connected, even if only tangentially.

The Vorshtein gag in the episode does that trick. “Vorshtein” sounds crazy but also sounds right. It seems like it might belong to some eminent Dr. Vorshtein with his eponymous Vorshtein effect, known to explain all that had been previously inexplicable, like humor and Libor rates. Had Elinoff said “crab cakes” instead of “Vorshtein,” it would have been even more incongruous but not funny. Had he said “Koestler,” it also wouldn’t have been funny, but at least the reference would have relevance for humor theorists.

Arthur Koestler, perhaps best known for his anti-totalitarian novel, “Darkness at Noon,” wrote an interesting book back in 1964, called “The Act of Creation,” in which he linked the creative processes behind humor, art, and science. He coined the term “bisociation” to refer to the mental process involved in perceiving humorous incongruity. According to Koestler, bisociation occurs when something “is simultaneously perceived from the perspective of two self-consistent but normally unrelated and even incompatible frames of reference. Thus, a single event ‘is made to vibrate simultaneously on two different wavelengths, as it were.’”

But the vibes from Elaine’s cartoon are bad ones. So Jerry takes a stab at a caption.

That satisfies Koestler’s criteria for humor because it brings together two different meanings of “sty.” Having a pig as the protagonist in a cartoon lends itself to that sort of punning.

But now Elaine is unsatisfied, and complains that Jerry’s caption is too “jokey.” Then, taking another page from Elinoff’s playbook, Elaine positions her cartoon as a “slice of life,” saying of her caption, “That’s nice. That’s real.” This contradicts her earlier justification of it being not-normal, but that doesn’t matter. Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds and the bane of rapid-fire dialogue humor. Which is why Jerry can easily do a one-eighty from his previous assessment of the cartoon as “pretty good.”

Elaine comes back with what she thinks is the ultimate snobby rejoinder. However, when she puts down the drawing pad, Kramer picks it up to enter the caption sweepstakes.

Now it’s your turn. Elaine finally did get her cartoon in The New Yorker, or at least half of it, courtesy of Mick Stevens and our Caption Contest. Just click on the image below to enter—or complain.