Seeing the Dolphins

Revisiting a childhood challenge to prove a point

Dec 01, 2023

I’m taking a break from The Honda Civic Diaries this week because there isn’t much to report, but I do have a personal story I wanted to share.

No matter how hard I stared at the poster on the wall of my doctor’s office, the only thing I saw was a sea of blue-green dots.

“You don’t see the dolphins?” my dad asked. “Try looking at it cross-eyed.”

It was a low-stakes challenge — my dad’s way of helping my brother and I pass the time as we waited for our doctor to enter the exam room for our annual physical. But, like the other low-stakes challenges my dad was constantly putting us up to, such as mastering the monkey bars or learning to dive head first into a swimming pool, it was always tinged with an atmosphere of competition and a pressure to never give up, regardless of how useless or inconsequential the skill was.

“I see them!” shouted my brother. “There’s two dolphins, and a treasure chest.”

Of course he sees them. I thought to myself. As an oldest child, there’s nothing more humiliating than having a younger sibling pick up something faster than you. If he could see them, then I had to figure out how to see them.

“You just have to focus your eyes right,” said my dad.

I tried everything he suggested: staring at the middle of the poster, letting the blobs go in and out of focus, getting closer to the poster, getting farther from the poster, none of it worked.

I couldn’t see the damn dolphins.

If you grew up in the '90s, you might know the thing I’m describing. Magic Eye posters, or autostereograms, are optical illusions whereby a two-dimensional image, when viewed with the proper technique, reveals a three dimensional landscape. But the “proper technique” is non-intuitive, difficult to describe in words, and easier for some people to master than others, which is why my 10-year-old self could not figure out for the life of him how that inscrutable poster could possibly look like anything other than a bunch of 2D, Pollock-esque blobs.

Trying to write comedy is a lot like trying to look at a Magic Eye poster. First-time comedians, myself included, rarely hit the nail on the head on their first try. This feels especially infuriating considering we’ve often been drawn to comedy our entire lives, which is why we’re compelled to create comedy in the first place. We know what’s funny. We know the right punchline is there. And yet we can’t find it. We are all 10-year-olds sitting in our doctors’ offices staring at posters of blobs that we cannot, for the life of us, figure out how to turn into dolphins.

Publishing my first book, Spoilers: Essays That Might Ruin Your Favorite Hollywood Movies, is an accomplishment that would’ve felt impossible to me just a few years ago. Although I’m far from what you’d call a “successful” writer, I’m proud of the progress I’ve made. And it’s made me wonder, How exactly did I get to where I am now? When did things start to click? And how can I keep improving?

So I decided to go back and try to learn to do something I’ve never been able to do, and see if, armed with twenty more years of experience, I could finally crack it.

I was gonna figure out how to see the dolphins.

Step 1 was googling “Magic Eye posters” to see whether, with a fully developed prefrontal cortex, I would be able to intuit my way into seeing the images. I tried the same instructions my dad had given me: “look at it cross-eyed, move close, move farther, change your focus.” Although this did not result in being able to view the hidden 3D image, it did reveal one thing: my far-sightedness has definitely gotten worse, and I really should see an optometrist.

Step 2 was googling “how to look at a Magic Eye poster.” This led to one important insight, which was to start by looking at the image close up and out of focus and slowly pulling back. That was a far more disciplined strategy than my dad’s “cross your eyes and move around and shit” approach. Armed with this tactic, I was able to start to see some blurry blobs coming off the screen a little bit, but no cohesive images yet. Still, progress!

For Step 3, I looked up Magic Eye posters on Wikipedia to learn more about the science behind the illusion. Wikipedia, which did not exist when I was ten (a realization that now haunts me daily) provided two additional insights:

The first was the concept of vergence, which basically means the angle of your eyes relative to one another. The farther an object is, the more parallel, or divergent, your eyes have to be in order to focus on it. And the closer an object is, the more convergent your eyes have to be in order to focus on it (think looking at your nose cross-eyed). In order to see a Magic Eye poster, your eyes must be parallel or “wall-eyed” relative to the 2D image. In other words, your eyes have to be looking past the poster. This is literally the optical opposite of looking at the image cross-eyed. So one of my dad’s instructions was completely counter-productive, though you can imagine how someone might mistakenly describe looking “past” something as looking at it “cross-eyed.”

The second key insight was the concept of motion parallax. This is the idea that objects at different distances appear to move at different speeds as you move your head perpendicular to them. This, I learned, is an additional tool the brain uses in order to perceive depth.

Armed with this newfound understanding, I tried looking at the dolphin poster again. I got right up to my computer screen, this time looking past the image and slowly drew my head backwards. As I moved backwards, I also wiggled my head side to side just a tiny bit – half an inch or so – to use motion parallax in order to better perceive any differences in depth within the image. Gradually, blurry clumps of dots emerged and began to jump out farther and farther from the other dots. And then, with my head about 2 feet away from my screen, my eyes locked in on an unmistakable, crystal-clear 3D landscape: two dolphins jumping through the water and, on the ocean floor below them, an overflowing treasure chest.

As a writer, I can’t say I’ve ever had an “aha!” moment as abrupt as seeing the dolphins in the Magic Eye poster for the first time. But, as I look back on my writing now versus when I first started out, the sensation is incredibly similar. I can look at my writing now and identify whether a joke is specific enough. I can tell when a premise feels like it has legs. I can see these things in my mind’s eye almost by instinct. And, like the Magic Eye poster, once you see it, it’s hard to unsee it.

But how did I develop that intuition? And how do I explain that understanding to someone else?

I teach satire writing courses at The Second City, and, when I first started teaching, it would often take me hours to write feedback for a single one of my students. I would read their work and think, this piece is pretty funny, but it’s missing something, unsure of how to punch it up.

I imagine that’s how my dad must have felt trying to show me how to look at a Magic Eye poster. He could do it himself through intuition, but couldn’t articulate what he was doing in a way that made sense to 10-year-old me.

I’ve gradually gotten better at quickly identifying problem areas in my students’ work and putting into words specifically what could be improved. This has come through tons of practice, but also, I now realize, from my attempts to drill down into the science of what makes us laugh. Starting from the basic building blocks, I’ve tried to develop a holistic understanding of humor, which has helped me both as a writer and a teacher.

Other things have helped too, of course. Reading tons and tons and tons of humor has helped me get a better sense of what works and what doesn’t, absorbing this knowledge almost by osmosis. Taking classes has also helped, as each class I’ve taken has given me small nuggets of insight that have helped me think about writing in new ways. And writing a shitton over the last five years has helped because, as I said earlier, nobody writes well right out the gate.

That said, I can’t articulate a step-by-step, surefire method of becoming a better writer. And even if I did, what has worked for me might not work for everyone else. There’s still a lot that I don’t know about writing (I’m not happy with the two half-hour pilots I’ve written), and, to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, probably things that I don’t even know that I don’t know about writing.

But, every time I encounter a new Magic Eye poster in my career (trying to write a screenplay, trying to market a book, trying to write an essay about the craft that is succinct, insightful, and interesting to read), I’ll do my best to look straight ahead, slowly bring my head back, and wiggle back and forth a little.

With any luck, I’ll eventually see dolphins.

If you’re reading this on a desktop, can you do me a favor? Can you try the technique I described and see whether you can see the dolphins? Did my descriptions of the technique make sense? Am I qualified to teach Autostereogram 101? Let me know.