Reframing also appears in almost every joke. What seems to be one thing, suddenly shifts and becomes something else.

1) «What's green all over and has wheels?»

2) «What do Alexander the Great and Smokey the Bear have in common?»

(Answers appear at the end of this introduction.)

Reframing is also the pivotal element in the creative process: it is the ability to put a commonplace event in a new frame that is useful or enjoyable. A friend of physicist Donald Glaser pointed to a glass of beer and jokingly said «Why don't you use that to catch your subatomic particles?» Glaser looked at the bubbles forming in the beer, and went back to his lab to invent the «bubble chamber," similar to the Wilson cloud chamber, for detecting the paths of particles in high–energy physics experiments. Arthur Koestler, in The Act of Creation, calls this process «bisociation»: the ability to simultaneously associate an event in two very separate and different contexts.

In general communication theory there is a basic axiom that a signal only has meaning in terms of the frame or context in which it appears. The sound of a squeaky shoe on a busy sidewalk has little meaning; the same sound outside your window when you are alone in bed means something else altogether. A light in a church belfry is simply that. But to Paul Revere it meant that the British were coming, and also how they were coming: «one if by land, and two if by sea.» The light only has meaning in terms of the previous instructions that established a frame—an internal context that creates meaning.

Reframing appears widely in the therapeutic context. When a therapist tries to get a client to «think about things differently» or «see a new point of view» or to «take other factors into consideration," these are attempts to reframe events in order to get the client to respond differently to them.