“Nonsense is the art of deliberately standing on your head.” (Robert Benayoun)

Nonsense and humor create connections where there are none. They connect the incompatible and thus create new perspectives and meanings. In doing so, they play with language and question what is considered logical. In his work, Jakob Schäfer examines the extent to which nonsense and humor can serve as tools in illustration to create new narratives. His theoretical and practical investigation shows that nonsense is not just nonsense, but has creative potential. It can reflect humorously and question social conventions. Humor reinforces this effect by breaking through expectations and enabling a new attitude towards creative work. In a creative investigation, a comic about envy and tomatoes, a book that illustrates rhetorical stylistic devices using chairs and an animated film about the climate crisis were created. The largest result is the book “Current Excavations”, which is a collection of illustrations that were created during the explorative examination of the topic of this work. Jakob Schäfer's current excavations, in his head, through nonsense. (Text: Jakob Schäfer)