Your Brain’s Built-In Context Filter
Frame Semantics & Stand-Up Comedy (Comedy Mindhacks #16)
Imagine telling someone, “Hey, I’ll catch you at the club later” only to realize, hours afterward, that they showed up at the country club instead of the comedy club. That would suck. But there’s a reason things like this happen. There’s a reason your brain meant “nightclub” while theirs meant “golf outing.” Context matters! And it matters more than most of us think. Another way to say this: when you miss the frame you miss the moment.
I italicize the term frame there because I’m using it in a very specific way, namely, in terms of “Frame Semantics” (FS).1 Originating in the 1970s with linguist Charles Fillmore, FS considers how meaning depends on mental structures we call frames. Every word we utter brings forward an entire background of assumptions with it in our listeners’ heads. For instance, if I say “wedding,” people are likely to imagine a groom, a bridge, a church, tuxedos, a cake, dancing, etc. What doesn’t come to mind is someone standing alone at a buffet forklifting shrimp cocktail onto their plate. If, however, I said “Golden Corral,” that might be the exact image that comes to mind for them.
A frame sets the stage for everything that follows. In stand-up comedy, framing is powerful. It’s kinda like the secret seasoning that tells the audience how to taste your joke before the punchline even lands. If I begin a joke with “Last week my car died in the desert,” an image forms in their mind and brings an entire frame of related images with it. Maybe it’s a survival frame complete with rattlesnakes and sweat and dehydration. But if I get my frame wrong, I simply invite confusion into the equation and my punch is sure to bomb.
Frame Semantics applies pretty much everywhere beyond comedy, too. For example, if I go up to my wife and say, “We need to talk,” I’ve created a terribly negative frame. Indeed, without framing it as “I love you but we need to fix this,” it’s probably gonna trigger every breakup movie ever made. But if I frame it as “I thought of a way to improve our already incredible relationship,” my wife will probably lean in rather than start Googling divorce lawyers. That’s because, pretty much always, context is the narrator of our emotional scripts.
In a nutshell: choosing the right words at the start is like choosing the right uniform for the mental battlefield. The magic of FS is that it helps us realize we are the directors of our audience’s internal movie. We get to choose the opening scene, the soundtrack, and even the lighting before our first line. Every detail we drop primes them to laugh, nod, or howl.
Check out the Jewish rhetorical/literary practice known as “remez” for something similar.