Skip to main content

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/
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Pir-E-Kamil - The Perfect Mentor by Umera Ahmed: book review

The Perfect Mentor pbuh  (2011) is set in Lahore and Islamabad in Pakistan. The novel commences with Imama Mubeen in medical university. She wants to be an eye specialist. Her parents have arranged for her to marry her first cousin Asjad. Salar Sikander, her neighbour, is 18 years old with an IQ of 150+ and a photographic memory. He has long hair tied in a ponytail. He imbibes alcohol, treats women disrespectfully and is generally a “weird chap” and a rude, belligerent teenager. In the past three years he has tried to commit suicide three times. He tries again. Imama and her brother, Waseem, answer the servant’s call to help Salar. They stop the bleeding from his wrist and save his life. Imama and Asjad have been engaged for three years, because she wants to finish her studies first. Imama is really delaying her marriage to Asjad because she loves Jalal Ansar. She proposes to him and he says yes. But he knows his parents won’t agree, nor will Imama’s parents. That
1 comment
Read more

Flaws in the Glass, a self-portrait by Patrick White: book review

The manuscript, Flaws in the Glass (1981), is Patrick Victor Martindale White’s autobiography. White, born in 1912 in England, migrated to Sydney, Australia, when he was six months old. For three years, at the age of 20, he studied French and German literature at King’s College at the University of Cambridge in England. Throughout his life, he published 12 novels. In 1957 he won the inaugural Miles Franklin Literary Award for Voss, published in 1956. In 1961, Riders in the Chariot became a best-seller, winning the Miles Franklin Literary Award. In 1973, he was the first Australian author to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for The Eye of the Storm, despite many critics describing his works as ‘un-Australian’ and himself as ‘Australia’s most unreadable novelist.’ In 1979, The Twyborn Affair was short-listed for the Booker Prize, but he withdrew it from the competition to give younger writers the opportunity to win the award. His autobiography, Flaws in the Glass
Post a Comment
Read more

The Beggars' Strike by Aminata Sow Fall: book review

The Beggar’sStrike (1979 in French and 1981 in English) is set in an unstated country in West Africa in a city known only as The Capital. Undoubtedly, Senegalese author Sow Fall writes of her own experiences. It was also encapsulated in the 2000 film, Battu , directed by Cheick Oumar Sissoko from Mali. Mour Ndiaye is the Director of the Department of Public Health and Hygiene, with the opportunity of a distinguished and coveted promotion to Vice-President of the Republic. Tourism has declined and the government blames the local beggars in The Capital. Ndiaye must rid the streets of beggars, according to a decree from the Minister. Ndiaye instructs his department to carry out weekly raids. One of the raids leads to the death of lame beggar, Madiabel, who ran into an oncoming vehicle as he tried to escape, leaving two wives and eight children. Soon after, another raid resulted in the death of the old well-loved, comic beggar Papa Gorgui Diop. Enough is enou
8 comments
Read more