Estadísticas de PQR

Mallan (2013) remarks that a list of humorous devices like those discussed in the previous section does not necessarily explain why children of different ages find certain things funny and others not. Mallan (2013:3) believes that what we need to understand is how children of different ages respond to humour “even if the extent to which such responses can be seen as a product of cultural conditioning rather than as a marker of cognitive and emotional development is yet to be resolved”. In her study of reader response to humorous literature, Shannon (1999) discovered that, apart from reader response studies, not many studies have focussed on humour response as a topic.

The first studies of humour and children are described by Monson (1978:16) as limited to the use of cartoons, jokes and excerpts from a story. She notes that “most of the research reported by psychologists has been based on responses to cartoons and jokes and has not really dealt with literary responses”. Monson’s work consists of a summary of studies conducted on children’s responses from 1966 to 1972. In her research, Shannon (1999) examines the responses of fourth and fifth graders to nine different humorous books. The children provided

her with the following devices that they found humorous: competence, superiority and sense of accomplishment; physical events; taboo or crude events; and language and wordplay.

Criticism of Shannon’s work by Munde (1997) included her book selection as well as the important aspect of allowing the children to have a choice in the selection of humorous texts.

Munde (1997) examined the differences in preferences of what adults and children perceive as humorous book choices for children and found a big difference between the selections of adults and children. The most important finding was that children respond differently to a funny book chosen by an adult than they do to those chosen by children. Following the children’s responses, Munde (1997:230) provides the following categorisation as a guide for the selection of books for children:

5–8-year-olds: a greater overall proportion of humorous books – diverse themes and reading levels;

more books with children than animals as main characters; books with underdog themes.

8–10-year-olds: Storylines that have child-satisfying but relatively harmless outcomes of defiant behaviour; children rather than animals as main characters; fewer folk and fairy tales; preference for joking insults and bad puns.

10–13-year-olds: fewer books that depict the transitional tasks of facing young adults as threatening, difficult or involving loss; shorter page length; fewer books that demand an adult’s literary background in order to be appreciated.

Munde (1997:230) says:

It is understandable that adults want children to have only the most productive reading experiences with the most worthy books, just as they want children to eat more vegetables than chocolate, but if the objective is to see that child readers develop into adult readers, then an abundance of chocolate can be consumed without harm.

Iser’s (1974) research cited in Schwàb (2003:170) shifts the focus from the text to the meaning that is created by the reader or child reader “somewhere between the text and the reader”. Iser’s studies regarding reader-response theories within the area of phenomenology gave impetus to the concept of the ‘implied reader’. Iser’s concept of the implied reader, therefore, indicates written and unwritten portions of a text. This process implies that the sentences in a text only serve to guide the reader who will then produce certain expectations within his/her mind (Iser 1972).

Apart from the response to humorous content, with regard to the influence of literature on its audience, Hunt (2004:163) postulates:

The question of how texts influence their audience has always been of particular interest for those in the field of children’s books. The books have always had a strong element of the didactic, and they have generally been assumed to have directly beneficial effects on their readers. Hugh Crago’s discussion of the question of whether, or how, books can be used as a mode of psychotherapy relates to reader-response theory, psychology, and literacy.

Here, Hunt refers to Crago’s (1979) bibliotherapy which refers to a broad range of methods for helping human beings in distress. Crago (1979:635) explains that the word bibliotherapy already suggests a specific therapeutic modality. He explains that art therapy, occupational therapy or dance therapy were all developed specifically “to meet the needs of patients perceived to be wholly or partly beyond the reach of mainstream psychotherapeutic methods”.

Furthermore:

if bibliotherapy is to fulfil its promise, its practitioners must learn to diagnose, their clients’ patterns of preferred reading through careful observation and questioning over time’ and ‘if bibliotherapy is understood as a way of affirming and extending an individual personality rather than as a way of

‘curing’ or ‘changing’ a person, then its chances of being useful will be far greater.

Mallan (1993:18) believes that, when readers begin to explore humorous literature, they are challenged to play with language which results in greater linguistic sophistication. She continues that they then view people and their actions in “ways which tend to reveal discrepancies between expectations and reality”. The result is that expected and accepted sequences of things are often turned upside down as they are confronted by deviations from that which is considered conventional social behaviour. Therefore, regarding the influence of humorous literature on children and their responses, Mallan (1993:18) notes that “humorous literature can be seen as quite subversive, demanding critical readers who do not passively accept what they read”. Whatever the method applied in obtaining reader response data, Schwartz (1977:282) notes that “children tend to be more playful than adults; as a result, they are inclined to laugh more readily and more frequently”. However, this notion is challenged by Martin and Kuiper (1999) who state that studies do not support the notion that adults’ and children’s responses to humour differ significantly. They observe that both adults and children laugh more during social interactions as well as those who have more extraverted personalities.

Shannon’s (1993) study regarding children’s responses to humour concurs with Mallan’s views that children do not passively absorb the texts that they read, but are active participants in the process. Her study revealed that children found that humour in books made them easier to read and demanded less background knowledge to understand the humour. Children responded to name-calling and funny-sounding words better than the more subtle forms of humour. Her

study also revealed that children responded better to subtle forms of humour when read to aloud.

The following section provides conclusions made from this literature review.