Comedy pragmatics

Much of our humour derives from violation or flouting of Grice’s maxims. A celebrated example is the Mrs Merton Show interview with Debbie McGee, in which Mrs Merton (Caroline Aherne) asked: ‘What was it that first attracted you to the millionaire Paul Daniels?’. By flouting the maxim of quantity (‘Do not make your contribution more informative than required’), she invited the audience to look for an interpretation in which the additional superfluous information (‘the millionaire’) was in fact required for the purposes of the exchange (in this case something along the lines of ‘Did you marry Paul Daniels for his money?’). Since this meaning was an implicature, it could of course have been plausibly denied.

In the scene in Alvin and the Chipmunks where the eponymous heroes first meet their carer Dave, humour arises not from a surfeit of information but from a lack of it, violating the quantity maxim in a different way. The three introduce themselves thus:

Simon: We’re getting off on the wrong foot. Allow us to introduce ourselves. Hello. I’m Simon. The smart one. He’s Alvin…

Alvin: …the awesomest one!

Theodore: And I’m Theodore.

The first two introductions set up the expectation that, for the purposes of this exchange, a name and exceptional personal quality is required. The suggestion here is that Theodore is unable to observe ‘quantity’ here, because he cannot think of an exceptional quality to boast about!