Dr. Seuss once said, “From there to here, and here to there, funny things are everywhere.” The text “Beauty and the Beast”, written by Dave Barry follows those words and makes a typical topic of gender differences into a hilarious content. It explores the different level of importance that men and women give to the way others perceive them using the mainstream stereotype of men, who cares less about their perception, as opposed to women, who obsess over theirs, as a basis for outlining this text. He provides many reasons and examples that support his thesis of men having no interest in his or anyone’s appearance compared to women who torment themselves with their appearance. These reasons and examples, though mostly stereotypic, are debatable in their humor aspect when viewed through …show more content…
John Morreall in his writing Taking Laughter Seriously defines the incongruity theory as “…an intellectual reaction to something that is unexpected, illogical, or inappropriate in some other way” (15). In other words, it is an intelligent person’s out of place reaction to things, actions, or behaviors. Something is considered out of place when they are unexpected or do not follow the pattern people normally think for it will follow. Kant takes this principle of unexpectedness and puts it into his own words as, “Laughter is an affection arising from sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing” (qtd. in Morreall). In this quote Kant is saying that we laugh when we expect something or an action to go a certain way but it does not; it turns into nothing, in other words out of place. This principle, expectation turning into the unexpected, of the incongruity theory is the one that is seen throughout Barry’s “Beauty and the Beast”. It serves as the reason for our laughter at the comical aspects in the Barry’s