[lit-ideas] Re: Insults Which Are Humourous (Maybe)
- From: jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 08 May 2010 15:26:00 -0400
My last post today.
Thank you, Larry. I did send my post without checking your reply to
Geary. I was just reacting to his funny way of posting things, "I guess
that´s a humorous insult". How can he GUESS that? Surely it´s NOT
something _I_ would guess. McEvoy makes a good point, but he finds that
someone said something humorous "if everybody else is cracking up",
which I find, if I may say, idiotic (not on him, but on me, if I were
to act like that). For example, Charlie Chaplin is NOT humorous.
So, to the detail of L. Helm´s comments. He should write to my
griceclub.com, more often. He said he tried once, but they were asking
for hypertext and failed to submit the post or comment. He is an author
there, so he should try again. Etc. This in case we want to consider
the pragmatics of all this in closer detail.
"JL, Your considerations don't exhaust the possibilities".
I´m happy to realise. I was just "linguistic botanising", i.e.
considering phrases with "guess" (NOT a verb I use! and others). A
friend of mine, whose English is pretty archaic, was having a chess
game on the internet, and he asked, "Care for another game?". "Guess
not", was the reply. He came to me, "How can he GUESS that?"
Helm:
"consider: I found it humorous to associate the German man marrying the
cat. By voicing that humor (found humorous by me) I assumed it would
be mildly insulting and slightly less humorous (but still somewhat
humorous) to Mike. Mike seemed to find it more insulting than
humorous. There could be several reasons for that. The most probable
one is that people not from the South like to poke fun at the South for
its backwardness."
Yes, that IS confusing. I thought he was from Seattle. He lived in
Seattle for years. So, he should have broadened his horizons. It´s not
like "born and bred" in the South, or Tennessee. He´s traveled wide. He
was in Canada during the Vietnam war. His brother lives in Denmark. His
son lives in Washington DC. It´s not like he is "Burnside", the Local
Memphisian. He knows. So, the locale of Geary is neither here nor
there. He has an "international" even metrosexual cyberpersona and he
should be ready to assume the position.
Helm:
"The first "few hundred times" they heard jokes like that they seem
humorous, but now they are just "old, old, old -- and tiresome --barely
worth responding to.""
------ "I'm guessing it is supposed to be a humorous insult,"
"might mean
(2) I've heard humorous insults against the South so often I can no
longer be sure what they are."
----- Yes. Mind I didn´t check your source, because I believe people
CAN marry cats. Grice says cats are good as philosophical tools because
you can do almost anything with them. His example is the Provost of
Oriel College, who had this dog, but dogs were not allowed in College,
so the Governing Body passed a decree that the dog be DEEMED a cat.
That´s a short step from marrying one, I suppose.
Note that Geary should not be anti-zoophilia like that. After all, he
had circulated "Economy explained with two sheep" where it referred to
the "Deep South down Under" -- "they look at the sheep with amicable
eyes". "Marriage" or civil union is not something that requires
"upkate" necessary. Austin was confused with this. He thought "uptake"
was required. "Do you take this woman as your wedded wife?", I do. And
you, I do, she says. Then They Are Married. There are a lot of things
that can go wrong here (vide Priestly, When we are married). And I
wouldn´t know if the cat got married. Your remark was that a man
married a cat, but did not mention anything about a cat marrying a man.
Helm:
"I found, and still find, such associations (Tennessee with
backwardness) amusinglargely because my wife's family was from
Tennessee."
"was" is well put. Ultimately, I expect she was from Britain. Geary has
a problem here. He believes that ("Geary" is a well-known Irish
surname, or English, or Scots), "or else it could be Jewish: Gahrison.
The Tennessee has nothing to do with anything. Families don´t HAIL from
Tennessee. Etc.
Helm:
"Her maiden name is McWherter (a relative was once governor of
Tennessee)."
You see what I mean? Good Scottish thing. There is a famous historian
of the English language (African American, I think) that goes by
"McWhorter", but I may be wrong. I like the Anglo-Saxon of "Wherter".
And I take it to be Scots because my understanding (cfr. whiskie) is
that the Irish spelling would be "MacWherter". I suppose she gets often
asked, "mc, or m-a-c?"
Helm:
"Also I had a Tennessean working for me at McDonnell Douglas for
several years who strove hard to shed his association with backwardness
and to present himself as an intellectual. I don't recall that he
found my Tennessee-jokes humorous either, but, once again (and
something you didn't cover) I did."
Yes. But again, note that I was just replying to Geary´s fast comment
-- fresh, even, "I guess I should be insulted by such a bad joke" --
rather than your wise reply to it.
Helm:
"Which is to disagree with Austin: illucutionary uptake is not
essential for me to be amused."
That´s very good. Austin thought that only
"I bet"
requires illocutionary uptake.
Colloquially, people do use "I bet my arse it will rain tomorrow",
without EXPECTING a reply, "OK, bet taken". I suppose people are
becoming looser and looser talkers.
With "joke" you are terribly right. I get bored, often, though, that
people fail to detect my ironies, and even, my intention TO GET
ironies. I expect people to be IRONIC with me, and when, not only they
don´t recognise my ironies, but reply to them "LITERALLY" bores me to
tears. Irony can be one-way, and I derive loads of pleasure in
displaying irony with people even if they fail to recognise it.
Helm:
"In fact if I were not amused I would not have presented it to Mike as
humor."
Right. Perhaps it IS a good joke. A man married a cat. Again, I was not
too interested in reading. Had the headline read, "A cat married a man"
-- mabbe. But with all the psychos out there, I don´t think that the
fact that the German was Memphisian would help to bring an interest to
the story.
What I did find sarcasticaly great on you was the idea of a "pet
theory" by Geary, and then go on to display that someone in Tennessee
married a felis domesticus. Which they may well be separated by now.
Helm:
"One of the two of us found humor in it; so if our testimony is
important in the determination of whether a joke is humorous, my
testimony must count as much as Mike's, or if not quite as much as the
illucutionary uptake, at least something."
Yes.
For Austin, the speech act has three levels:
locutionary 1. phatic
2 phonic
3 rhemic -- sense & reference (meaning)
illocutionary -- uptake (the recognition of the intention). the force.
perlocutionary -- the intention other than illocutionary. The "effect".
E.g. to amuse.
-----
Helm:
"Had this been the first humor ever presented to him about Tennessee,
he might have been found it amusing."
That´s a good one. Perhaps we can find what was the first joke ever
made on Tennessee and check if Geary finds it funny.
"I find Austin's association of betting with joking humorous. Here we
have, I suspect, an illucutionary uptake involving humor without the
intention of humor on Austin's part."
Yes. Recall Austin is not Grice. For Grice, you can be your own
audience. You can marry yourself, for example. "Surely Austin is wrong
in thinking all our communicative intentions are addressed to others.
When I write, "Dear Diary", I mean myself on a future occasion".
Helm:
"Mike ((Geary)) can "refuse to be insulted" implies a serious insult."
Yes. I brought that onto the bargain because it IS a tricky example by
Grice in his early 1948 essay on Meaning (never meant to be published).
He is furthering the anti-Austinian line of focusing on the "intention"
as "response" or "effect" on the part of the addressee. And he wants it
to be restricted to "belief".
For Grice, what Geary can at most "recover" or infer from your point
is, "Helm thinks he will amuse me". For Grice, it would be ODD if you
intend TO amuse Geary. The most you can do is intend to instil on him a
piece of something out of which he can derive some fun, or some insult,
or both.
Helm:
"But if jokes about the South are heaped upon it with tiresome
frequency, refusal is not necessary to avoid being insulted."
Right. Geary, in being brief, failed to communicate with us while he
had that wild "guessing" -- that it was a humourous insult. The bit
about "humorous" seems clear enough. He did NOT find it "humourous".
For the least thing he could have done is add a smiley or something --
There are levels here, LOLOTF, etc. The point
with "offense" is trickier.
"No offence meant, not taken"
is usually anti-Gricean. For Grice, one shouldn´t be more informative
than required. So, why add, "no offence meant," unless you do MEAN it.
Similarly, "not taken", means, "I am hurt, but then you should not get
the pleasure out of it."
The politics of "No offense meant, not taken" run along identical lines
with "no pun intended". Surely he INTENDED it -- why even bother
otherwise. The only pun not intended, logically, is the one that goes
unmarked. Similarly, it´s like saying, "expletive deleted", or "no
comments". Silly.
Helm:
"Hearing something the thousandth time lacks the poignancy of hearing
it for the first time."
I think you are hypothesising with some complexity that the Geary case
may not demand. First, we do not THINK he heard the SAME insult 1,000
times. Each insult brings an element of novelty. It is what Austin and
Grice call the "context of utterance". In this sense, language is NOT
like sex. Where "the first time" IS given some importance (especially
by females). Etc.
Helm:
"Note that Mike switch the object of my humor from Tennessee to The
South."
Yes. That was terrible. He didn´t even explain or provided a caveat, or
a justification. He just broadened the scope of your very specific
remark about this German marrying his poodle in Memphis to something
which may apply to a Alabama, or who knows where.
Helm:
"That is something I would not have done."
Right. It´s very subtle to switch the object of humor, especially when
the whole point is the locality or ethnicity. There is a lot of
regional colour here that is otherwise missing. And did you find his
reference to many famous authors being from the South relevant? He did
add, "go figure", i.e. "try to work out the implicature for that", so
perhaps it was one of his riddles -- like "Why is a raven like a
writing desk"?. As Borges said when he lectured on literature in the
South, "All literature starts with New England" (He held a visiting
professional capacity at UTexas-Austin).
Helm:
"Which made me think of how Germany is related to the rest of Europe.
If the demographic trends we read about continue, and the US gets
larger and more important while Europe gets smaller and less important,
the time may come when Germany is treated in Europe similarly to the
way Tennessee is treated in the US. There are some similarities.
Germany produce Hitler; while Tennessee produced our most war-like
President, Andrew Jackson, who, incidentally, was also guilty of
genocide. Germans have in the past been noted for being especially
warlike. That is also true of Tennesseans (although there are
anomalies like Mike)."
Right. Yes, they are comparable. Note though that I wouldn´t call
Hitler a German. He was Austrian, right? I make a BIG difference there.
I KNOW that if I were an Austrian I would HATE to say that my lingo is
DEUTSCHE. But the Austrians, except perhaps Hitler, are a type of
population that are apparently easily directed, in thought progresses.
I live Austria, and find it more civilised than Germany in many
aspects. Opera, for example. Salzburg. Mozart LOVED Italy. The Italians
like Austria. Germany is a different country.
Etc.
J. L. Speranza
Buenos Aires, Argentina
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