Funny you should mention that…

Lawrence J. Kramer for the Grice Club

I came upon an interesting paper this morning about humor and Grice’s maxims.  How, you ask, did that happen?  Funny you should mention that…

Dick Cavett writes a column for the New York Time on line edition.  This week, he wrote a remembrance of Art Linkletter, who died yesterday, I think.  Cavett was for some time a joke-writer for a TV show, and Linkletter was, briefly, a joke-teller on that show.  One of the other writers was named Dave.  Cavett relates that Linkletter would spoil jokes by making explicit what is usually left for the audience to realize:

One night at dinner at Dave’s house… , he reduced the table to hysterics by recalling a specific example of what he called “how to Linkletterize a joke.” So that no living being of whatever dimness could be left behind in getting it.

Ready? All you youngies need to know is that there was once a popular comic named Jack E. Leonard, a man physically rotund enough to be appropriately, and affectionately, called “Fat Jack.”

Here is the one line Art selected from that day’s Dave Lloyd submissions: “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 . . . .”

That’s how Dave wrote it.

Here’ what Art — democratically assuring that no one hearing it should be left in the dark — did to it. All emphases are his:

“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!”

The audience reaction? If someone had dropped a pin, it would have been deafening. 

So it struck me that Grice must have had something to say about humor, which turns on implicature, and, especially the flouting of maxims to create an implicature.   Googling took me to the article linked above. 

One of George Carlin’s lines strikes me as especially Gricean:

My grandfather would say: “I'm going upstairs to fuck your grandmother.” He was an honest man, and he wasn't going to bullshit a four-year-old.

Grandpa flouts the maxim of quantity with WAY too much information, and the maxim of manner (I guess) by using profanity with a small child.   Then Carlin’s flouts the maxim of relevance by defending the Grandfather’s adherence to the maxim of quality when it was his flouting of quantity and manner that needed explanation.   (JL may have a different analysis.)

One of my favorite one-liners takes the same, usually benign relationship in another direction.  Steven Wright complains about his mean grandfather:

When I was little my grandfather asked me how old I was.  I said, "Five." He said, "When I was your age, I was six."

I can’t articulate why that’s funny.  Maybe the impossibility of the grandfather’s claim suggests the enormity of the insult, which we must remember is being delivered by someone who should be doing just the opposite.   I’d like to hear a Gricean analysis of that one.