Babies. Blenders. Two nouns that should not appear in the same sentence. The discomfort of imagining them together produces laughter — not because babies-and-blenders is itself funny, but because the incongruity of the pairing generates comic energy. Lewis names this Dicks-tradition humor technique: Babies and blenders sounds a bit weird. This is where you include two things together which shouldn't be together. For example, let's say you're telling a story where you involve a description of a kid who's very violent — you could say "the kid was waving his pencil around like an AK-47." Take things which are the complete opposites and put them together and they will be funny.1
The mechanic is incongruity-engineered laughter. Pair two concepts that violate audience-expectation about what belongs together. The violation produces the laugh. The kid's pencil is innocuous; an AK-47 is military-violent; pairing them via the simile the kid was waving his pencil around like an AK-47 forces the audience to hold both concepts simultaneously. The friction between the two produces the comic response.
The technique is the second of Lewis's two named humor mechanisms (alongside milk cans and baseballs). Together they give storytellers two deliberate humor-construction patterns. Most amateur storytellers default to spontaneous humor; learning the two named patterns provides reliable deployment.
The mechanic has three properties:
1. Identify two concepts that obviously don't belong together. Babies and blenders. Children's pencils and AK-47s. Quarterly earnings reports and medieval ritual sacrifice. The pairing must feel unexpected — the audience must recognize the incongruity within milliseconds of hearing the pairing.
2. Pair them via simile, metaphor, or direct combination. The kid was waving his pencil around like an AK-47. The simile (like) does the joining work. Other constructions also work: Her grocery list read like a medieval ritual sacrifice document. His apartment smelled like a baby blender after a particularly aggressive Tuesday.
3. Don't explain the joke. The incongruity does the work. The audience holds both concepts, feels the friction, laughs. Explanation kills it. The kid was waving his pencil around like an AK-47 — you know, the way kids sometimes do when they're acting out violent fantasies destroys the laugh by spelling out the incongruity that should have been left implicit.
The technique works because complete opposites placed together generates incongruity, which is one of the most reliable comic engines across cultures and forms.
The cognitive mechanism: human cognition is built to categorize. Concepts get filed into categories that belong together — kitchen-items, weapons, child-things, professional-things. When the storyteller pairs two concepts from incongruous categories, the audience's category-machinery briefly fails. The failure registers as humor.
The mechanism is similar to but distinct from milk-cans-and-baseballs. Milk-cans uses expectation-violation across time (setup builds expectation, punchline violates it). Babies-and-blenders uses category-violation in a single moment (the pairing itself is the comic event, with no setup-time required).
This is why babies-and-blenders can deploy in-line during fast-paced delivery without slowing the pace. Where milk-cans requires 10-30 seconds of setup-stack, babies-and-blenders fires in a single sentence. The technique can be inserted into existing material without restructuring.
Babies-and-blenders is one of two specific humor-techniques Lewis names alongside milk cans and baseballs. The two together give storytellers a deliberate toolkit.
The technique pairs cleanly with specificity is funny. Specific incongruity-pairings land harder than generic ones. The kid was waving his pencil like a weapon is generic; the kid was waving his pencil like an AK-47 is specific. The specific weapon-type amplifies the incongruity.
Babies-and-blenders deploys within the Mount Rushmore as one humor-engine tactical implementation. The technique is fast-deploying and works well throughout the piece-body rather than only at opening.
The technique connects to leverage audience imagination — the incongruity-pairing produces vivid mental imagery (the kid waving his pencil at AK-47-shooter posture) without the storyteller having to describe the imagery. The audience's mind constructs the image from the pairing.
You have a scene with a character or object that could be described more vividly. You're going to try babies-and-blenders.
Step 1: Identify what you want to convey. This kid was violent. This person was anxious. This place was chaotic.
Step 2: Brainstorm category-incongruous comparisons. For violent kid: AK-47 (military category), bar fight (adult category), Caligula (historical category). For anxious person: cornered animal, Victorian widow at a funeral, MRI patient. For chaotic place: medieval marketplace, daycare during a power outage, Times Square in 1979.
Step 3: Test for incongruity. Does the pairing feel off? Does the audience have to hold two distant concepts simultaneously? If yes, the pairing has comic potential.
Step 4: Insert via simile. The kid was waving his pencil around like an AK-47. She paced the conference room like a cornered animal. The office smelled like a medieval marketplace by Friday afternoon.
Step 5: Don't explain. Trust the audience to make the connection. The friction does the work.
Working storytellers report this technique is one of the easiest to install in revision. Generic descriptive sentences become comic sentences with one well-chosen incongruity-pairing.
Your pairing is too obvious. He was lazy like a sloth. The incongruity is weak; sloths and laziness are too-similar categories. The comparison doesn't generate friction.
Your pairing is offensive. Some incongruity-pairings can read as punching-down or insensitive. Babies and blenders is the technique-name but the actual pairing in a piece should avoid genuinely violent or insensitive imagery. AK-47 + pencil lands because it's absurdist, not because it's violent.
You over-explain. Like an AK-47 — you know, those military-grade assault weapons that... Cut the explanation. The audience knows what an AK-47 is.
You over-deploy. Too many incongruity-pairings in a single piece become tedious. One or two per minute of runtime is the working ceiling.
The babies-and-blenders technique is fundamentally about category-violation as comic engine. That mechanism has direct analogues.
Eastern spirituality: The Nine Rasas as Newsletter Architecture — Sanskrit aesthetic theory's Hāsya (comic rasa) includes specific incongruity-techniques (virodha) that produce humor through category-violation. Classical aesthetics theorized incongruity-comedy at depth at least 1,500 years before contemporary storytelling-craft did. The cross-tradition convergence: incongruity-as-comedy is universal across cultures and centuries.
Behavioral mechanics: Six-Minute X-Ray (Hughes) — Hughes's elicitation work uses category-incongruous prompts to break target patterns. Asking a target a question that violates their expected category produces a different response than category-conforming prompts. The mechanism is parallel — category-violation produces cognitive-state-shift in both audience (humor) and target (disclosure). Cross-orientation, the same cognitive mechanism produces different practical outcomes.
The Sharpest Implication Babies-and-blenders implies that comic energy is constructible through deliberate category-pairing rather than dependent on natural comic material. Most amateurs treat humor as discovered (the material is or isn't funny). The technique reveals humor as engineered (specific pairings produce reliable laughter). The toolkit is small (two named techniques: milk-cans, babies-and-blenders) but deployable on demand.
Generative Questions