Kramer, in his comments on
Carlin:
"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".
"I think the vulgarity is important to
the joke. Yes, the level of information is
itself odd, but odd isn't funny."
You think. I actually think, on most occasions, that odd is ALWAYS funny.
---- Recall we analysed the etymologies here, vis a vis, 'funny peculiar', 'funny ha ha'. I think he agreed that 'funny peculiar' predates 'funny ha ha' (or the other way round, I forget).
In any case, Grice uses 'odd', oddly, on one occasion, too many. Instead of indexing "Queen Elizabeth" in his Festschrift, they should have indexed 'odd' -- in WoW.
In general, 'odd' is THE sobriquet for the sort of inappropriateness that follows from NOT following those 'strategies' or what have you.
So I will or may elaborate on this.
As an exercise, I would suggest (but then I wouldn't, because suggest is boring) that you mention something which is ODD but NOT Funny.
I suppose I shoud propose the very scenario here:
"My grandfather would say, "I'm going upstairs to make love to your grandmother". He was an honest man and he wasn't going to bullshit a four-year old".
Part of the problem is the interaction of 'fuck' with BULLSHIT. Hence my titling the thing, "He wasn't going to bullshit". The point of bullshiting would be to call 'love' by the name that dares not tell its name, or something.
Oddly, there are MANY euphemisms for 'fuck', except 'fuck', of course, so one has to be careful there. Note that:
"My grandfather would say, 'I'm going upstairs to GO TO BED with your grandmother'. He was an honest man and he wasn't going to bullshit a four year old."
is INAPPROPRIATE -- and indeed odd but hardly funny. Indeed incomprehensible (and stuff).
So I propose an analyses of ways of bullshitting.
I proposed that NOT saying anything would be the normal thing to do, in which case, the choice that U places on Sub-U is otiose, or ill-formulated. Surely nobody was ASKING the grandfather to bullshit his grandson.
Note that in some milieus ('Hill billy'?) 'fuck' may NOT be a rude word. I can imagine a community where it has no bad overtones, and where the joke would not translate. Or not.
(But I suppose that if 'fuck' were not a vulgarism in that community, 'bullshit' would EITHER --. As an exercise, polite rephrasals of both 'fuck' and 'bullshit' as used by Carlin, may be in order. Or not).
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
I agree that odd is often funny, and that removing the profanity from Carlin's line leaves an amusing residue.
ReplyDeleteBut Grandpa's behavior without the bad word suggests senility, which we laugh at because, like the old silver clock on the wall, it waits for us all. The dirty word simultaneously changes the senility to virile feistiness and doubles down on grandpa's inappropriateness. As Henry James might have said, with special aptness, the F-word adds the turn of the screw.
Meanwhile, Carlin's "bullshit" just heightens Carln's feigned indifference to Grandpa's bad language. To put this in context, here is how Carlin made the transition from clean TV performer to blue stand-up. He was quite sensitive to the power of bad words, and used them as tools of his trade.
"He was quite sensitive to the power of bad words, and used them as tools of his trade."
ReplyDeleteYes, indeed he was. And thanks for the link. I wrote about them under "George Calvin's disimplicatures" because he certainly seems to be into the philosophy of language or philosophical linguists as it were. I loved his discussion of the linguist objecting (-- well, a 'purist of the English language', I think he calls him) on 'motherf*cker' being a reduplicative (or 'duplication' -- I fail to see what does get duplicated, though). And also his point about 'sinn' and 'bedeutung' vis a vis fuck vs. fart. His point being, if I understood him alright, that 'fuck' is part of the 'plot' (perhaps in his three liner, "I'm going upstairs to fuck your grandmother"), and as such it is acceptable. But he finds that farting is NEVER (hyperbolically) part of the plot. There are other comments from him that reminded me of Grice's pretty silly (i.e. blessed) idea of 'disimplicature' which I have discussed elsewhere. He thinks that some people DISIMPLICATE (perhaps as much as they IMPLICATE). To disimplicate is to drop entailments. So, all the grossness, profanity, etc. that one finds in some examples, perhaps they are dopped by another ONE. Etc. Or not.