‘The Incommensurate/Illogical in Perelman/Marx: the Pragmatics of American Humor’

This article offers a preliminary analysis of the language of certain varieties of American
comedy that arose out of the Vaudeville theater (from roughly 1890 – 1930) and, later, out of
the culture of popular magazine from (roughly) the 1920s to the 1950s. The focus is on the
exemplary and highly original comic language of S. J. Perelman (1904 – 1979), the Jewish
prose humorist, and Perelman’s quasi-mentor, the legendary stage and screen comedian Groucho
Marx (1890 – 1979), who was renowned for his improvisational wit. The article’s purpose is to
explicate, with reference to important developments in 20th century linguistics and semiotics,
some aspects of these highly original, self-conscious and indeed modernist verbal practices. It
also tentatively explores the significance of these unconventional linguistic intuitions in regards
to broader questions concerning the possibility of effective communication and, thus, the links
between discourse and social ideology in a mid-century American context. The theoretical
perspectives brought to bear on this subject include Grice’s theory of conversational implicature
and Austin’s Speech Act Theory—both cornerstones of linguistic pragmatics—as well as
Deleuze’s concept of a ‘minor literature,’ a theory of modernist literary practice substantially
determined by earlier developments in semiotic theory and philosophical pragmatism