My reading of both the New Wave Nonsense chapter within Humor in Contemporary Junior Literature and Alice in Wonderland helped me both better understand and enjoy this concept of using nonsense as a form of literary humor. The chapter had a lot of interesting divisions of nonsense that involve language, double-meaning, gross-out humor and context, but the exerts within the New Wave Nonsense chapter about nonsense being used as humor through the use (or rather lack) of logic was particularly funny to me. This is particularly true in Alice in Wonderland, as Wonderland’s inhabitants use almost all of these types of nonsense humor, but it’s when they go against logic, and both Alice and I (the reader) must really dial into their words in an effort make sense of it, that I end up smirking the most.

The interrogation scene within Alice in Wonderland where the king analysis’s the found note, while he tries to find the Knave of Hearts guilty for stealing the Queen’s tart’s was particularly funny, due to its use of literal language and disregard for logic. When he reads the part about the letter mentioning that its writer cannot swim, and then links this automatically to the Knave of Hearts (the Knave reminds him that he cannot swim because he is made out of cardboard) was particularly enjoyable. Additionally, when Alice reminds him of the part where it acknowledges that the letter says that nothing was taken in the first place, and the king’s sudden triumphant exclamation of this fact by pointing at the plate of tarts within the courtroom as if he had found them himself, added additional humor to this scene. It took me a moment to find the humor in it, because I had to analysis the situation and figure out both exactly what was said and how it supposedly makes sense to the character. I often found myself rereading the songs, poems and statements of most of the inhabitants in Wonderland, in hopes of doing something similar and this often ended with me understanding why it was funny. Interestingly though, when they made absolutely no sense (even with my use of common sense to understand it) it was still funny because of the absolute lunacy and needlessness of it being said in the first place (an example is the Hatter’s telling of a riddle and then him not knowing the answer to it when finally asked for it).