Mediation and Joke Design: Resolving the Incongruities

The purposes of this Article are: (1) to highlight some of these new discoveries; (2) to discuss their implications for mediators generally, particularly toward achieving super-optimum resolutions of conflict; (3) to explore the relationship of these discoveries to the brain's bilateral functions, creativity, and the process of humor and joke design; (4) to suggest techniques, based on joke design, for altering conflict frames of disputants; and (5) to suggest directions for further experimentation and research. Although the interrelationships among the separate topics presented here may not be immediately discernible, the seeming incongruities will be resolved in Part VIII