"BIG FAT Jack E. Leonard ... who's SO fat, he's a one-man comedy team ... ALL BY HIMSELF"

Kramer proposes for comparison (citing material)

--

THE INTENDED JOKE

On tonight’s show we’re going to talk about
comedy teams. You know, comedy teams like Laurel
and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, Martin and Lewis,
Jack E. Leonard..."

---

The 'joke' as went:

On tonight’s show we’re going to talk about
comedy teams. You know, comedy teams like Laurel
and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, Martin and Lewis,
and BIG FAT Jack E. Leonard -- who’s SO fat, he’s
a one-man comedy team . . . ALL BY HIMSELF.

Kramer reports cite: "The audience reaction? If someone had dropped a pin, it would have been deafening."

If _I_ had been in the first audience -- i.e. in the intended audience as per first and only version of the 'joke':

On tonight’s show we’re going to talk about
comedy teams. You know, comedy teams like Laurel
and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, Martin and Lewis,
Jack E. Leonard..."

I WOULD have needed the exegesis that Kramer's joke reports. WITHOUT it, or sans it, the joke would be in the use of the singular form,

"Jack E. Leonard" to mean a double act.

But surely it could be, the implicature (wrong one at that and thus 'implicature', rather) that he has a split personality?

---- Oddly, and NOT to make the wrong connection. When Grice was presented with the exegesis of his work by his former PhD Student Richard Orville Warner, and his 'habitually mischiveous' colleague, Richard Edward Grandy, Grice found himself that he had to be quoting, boringly and tiringsomely,

"As Richard Grandy and Richard Warner say..."; "Grandy and Warner want me to believe that ...", "Grandy and Warner are on spot when they suggest..."

----

The issue IS very subtle when it comes to joint authorship, and I'm ready to discuss this vis a vis Grice and Strawson, In defense of a dogma

Or Grice and Baker, "Davidson on weakness of the will"

Or Grice and Strawson and Pears, "Metaphysics" (in Pears, 1957)

--- and there ARE other cases (e.g. his joint study with Haugeland which Haugeland pulbished as if it were his own!) etc.

I am particularly interested in what Harnish (of the Bach and Harnish fame) calls 'conjunction reduction':

--- Grice and Strawson attacked Quine.
--- Grice attacked Quine.

-- In "In defense of a dogma" Grice claims that ...

This above, to me, is -- it false? I don't think so. I think it's more like underinformative. Since it's Grice and Strawson who claimed that ..., in their joint "In defense of a dogma". But I realise the issue is controversial and only mention the rightness of Grice's approach to sound provocative.

But back to Flanagan and Allen.
And Abbott and Costello.
And Laurel and Hardy
And Martin and Lewis.

And "Jack E. Leonard".

On second thoughts. The implicature can ONLY be that he is ROTUND. No way it could refer to a split personality. And I say without having seen a photo of him, or nothing (if you excuse me the nonlitotic double negative). Or not.