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Why are Dr. Seuss books so funny? There's a study about that ...




Why are Dr. Seuss books so funny – for adults and for children? Dr. Seuss, author of children’s books such as The Cat in the Hat, Green Eggs and Ham, and One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish, uses a lot of rhyming words. But he is funny because he also uses made-up words.



Psychology professor, Chris Westbury, at the University of Alberta, studied made-up words (The Washington Post, December 2, 2015). It is the first quantifiable theory of humour. Westbury used two inspirations for his study: (1) Arthur Schopenhauer, the 19th century German philosopher, pessimist, and creator of the ‘incongruity theory’, and (2) mathematics – specifically the Shannon entropy.

The incongruity theory explains why people laugh at things they don’t expect to see or hear. For example, made-up words like Dr. Seuss’s ‘yuzz-a-ma-tuzz,’ ‘oobleck,’ ‘truffula,’ and ‘sneetch’ makes people laugh. But why?



The Shannon entropy formula, developed by information theorist Claude Shannon, quantifies how much entropy (disorder) is contained within a message. Words with unusual or improbable letter combinations (such as oobleck, truffula, and sneetch) are more disordered than other words that make up real English-language words. Westbury wanted to test if disordered words are funnier that ordered words.

Westbury’s research team, and two linguists from the University of Tubingen in Germany, wrote a list of made-up words – some with a high degree of entropy (disorder) and some with a low degree of entropy. They asked participants to compare two words and choose which one was funnier, then rate each word’s level of funniness on a scale from 1 to 100.

The results showed that almost always people found the more disordered word funnier.

When Westbury deciphered 65 famous Dr. Seuss words, they were reliably more disordered than ordinary English words. But words are unpredictably funny – usually they just ‘feel’ funny. All humans, Westbury says, regardless of their native language, are born with certain expectations of how words should sound. When the sounds of words don’t meet our expectations, they sound ‘funny.’ Dr. Seuss instinctively knew that!

Westbury’s results will be published in the January 2016 issue of the Journal of Memory and Language.




https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/12/02/scientists-have-figured-out-what-makes-dr-seuss-so-silly/
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