When it comes to reading to small children, there is nothing better than a picture book that rhymes. And when it comes to picture books that rhyme, there is nothing better than Dr Seuss.
We have scads of his titles in our house, but at the moment How the Grinch Stole Christmas is the book of choice. We read it most nights. We enact it frequently (my younger daughter plays the role of little Cindy Lou Who beautifully, despite being unable to call her anything other than Cindy Woo-Hoo). The moments that invariably produce the most glee are the Grinch’s dastardly actions as he denudes the first little house on the square of Christmas paraphernalia. “He stuffed them in bags. Then the Grinch, very nimbly, / Stuffed all the bags, one by one, up the chimbley!” My kids are delighted – delighted! – by the idea of a chimbley. It gets them every time.
And now, perhaps, a psychology professor at the University of Alberta has found out why. Via publisher Melville House’s MobyLives blog, I came to Chris Westbury’s paper, published in the Journal of Memory and Language, in which he lays out his “quantifiable theory of humour”.
The study follows an earlier piece of research, in which Westbury found that subjects were laughing at made-up words such as “snunkoople”. He decided to find out why, hypothesising that the answer “lay in the word’s entropy – a mathematical measure of how ordered or predictable it is”. This means that non-words words such as “finglam”, with “uncommon letter combinations”, were likely to be funnier than made-up words such as “clester”, with “more probable combinations of letters”.
The study asked subjects to compare two non-words, picking the one they found funnier, and to rate a single non-word on a scale of one to 100, depending on how funny they found it. The more uncommon the letter combinations, the funnier a word was found to be. The Washington Post adds that when 65 “famous Seuss-isms” were put through Westbury’s formula to determine the entropy of a word, “Seuss’s terms were reliably more disordered than ordinary English words”.
And “though readers may think they’re laughing instinctively at young Gerald McGrew hunting the ‘Russian palooski’ and the ‘Fizza-ma-Wizza-ma-Dill’ in his ‘skeegle-mobile’, they are actually doing an ‘unconscious calculation’ in their heads about the improbability of those words,” according to Westbury.
“Dr Seuss – who makes funny non-words – made non-words that were predictably lower in entropy. He was intuitively making lower-entropy words when he was making his non-words,” said Westbury. “It essentially comes down to the probability of the individual letters. So if you look at a Seuss word like yuzz-a-ma-tuzz and calculate its entropy, you would find it is a low-entropy word because it has improbable letters like Z.”
So, not only does this study explain why I am endlessly charmed by the Hakken-Kraks in Oh, the Places You’ll Go! – it’s merely their proliferation of ‘k’s – but it also gives me the chance to list some of my favourite made-up Seussisms. The Whisper-ma-Phone, from The Lorax, is up there: “Then he hides what you paid him / away in his Snuvv, / his secret strange hole in his gruvvulous glove. / Then he grunts, I will call you by Whisper-ma-Phone, / for the secrets I tell you are for your ears alone.”
In fact, The Lorax is stuffed with fabulous nonsense, from Grickle-grass to the Once-ler. “Don’t knock at his door. / He stays in his Lerkim on top of his store. / He lurks in his Lerkim, cold under the roof, / where he makes his own clothes out of miff-muffered moof.”
Please share your favourites, and top miff-muffered moof, if you can. “Will you succeed? / Yes! You will, indeed! / 98 and 3/4 per cent guaranteed.”
