Cutting Room Floor Series, part 3, The Seven Word Summary

In my new paper, "A Theory of Humor (Abridged) and the Comic Mechanisms of John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces," just published as a book chapter in Theology and Geometry: Essays on John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, I had to toss out some thoughts because of space constraints. This series of posts, called "The Cutting Room Floor," publishes some of those items dropped from the final paper.

Cutting Room Floor Item Number 3: The Seven Word Summary

I am a fan of the Ig Nobel Prize, organized by Marc Abrahams of the Annals of Improbable Research. The Ig Nobel Prize is a comedy award for scientific research that first makes you laugh and then makes you think. An example was the 2018 Prize in Medicine which was given to researchers who used roller coasters to hasten the passage of kidney stones.

The invited lectures at the Ig Nobel ceremony are called the 24/7 lectures, and they have two parts, a clear explanation of the research in 24 seconds, and a summary of the research in seven words.

As part of my early drafts of my "Theory of Humor" paper, I had an abstract which could be read out loud in 24 seconds, and a summary in seven words. The essays in the book do not have abstracts, so I dropped those elements. Here they are:

Full Abstract in twenty-four seconds: A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy) by John Kennedy Toole uses the comic devices of farce and concurrent incongruities to generate its humor. The overarching incongruity of the book is between how Ignatius Reilly sees himself and how the reader sees him. Ignatius’s primary personality trait is his selfish immaturity, and he is both trickster and tricked. Toole may have drawn on concepts of the trickster and fool available at the time he wrote the novel from thinkers in psychology, sociology, history, and literary studies.

Brief summary in seven words: To understand Toole’s Ignatius, read Enid Welsford.