Arrested Development and Philosophy_ They've Made a Huge Mistake - Kristopher G. Phillips [52]
The Hearer Doesn’t Just Lay There, Michael, If That’s What You Were Thinking
The various ways language is used and abused in Arrested Development can shed some light on a few of the noncomedic mysteries of linguistic communication. What this series does hilariously and with consistent, spot-on skill, is exploit certain features of everyday language in order to simply make us laugh: Everything from double entendre (which happens most, if not all, of the time when Tobias speaks), polysemy10 and homophony,11 to utterances that implicate something meaningful rather than explicitly saying it (“I just blue myself”) and speech acts that do as much as they say (“I declare this [mock trial] a mistrial”). Arrested Development relies for much of its humor on the power of words to do what they say, as well as the power of words to implicate what they don’t explicitly say. In so doing, it teaches us about the role of context in grasping what is said and having what we say successfully grasped by others. Arrested Development shows us that it might always matter who is speaking as well as who is listening. Words are never uttered in a vacuum, and meaning is never understandable outside of the context of the utterance. If we ignore the multiple and various features of context, we’ve made a huge mistake.12
NOTES
1. The philosopher H. P. Grice used the terms speaker meaning and sentence meaning to delineate a very specific difference in linguistic meaning, what he also called the difference between the natural and nonnatural senses of means. I use these terms here more to put a name to the distinction between a speaker’s intention to mean something specific with what she says and the semantic content of the sentence that she utters and less to call upon Grice’s analysis of this difference.
2. Another fabulous example of comedy spawned from referential ambiguity is the multiple mistaken identities of hermano. At various points over several episodes in the first season (most notably “Marta Complex” and “Beef Consumme”), the word hermano is the crux of the story line. When Marta utters “hermano” while explaining to her mother that she’s in love with Gob’s brother, she means for her utterance to pick out Michael Bluth, even though the term itself can also point to (and is mistakenly taken to point to) her son’s brother, the brother of the make-up artist for her show, then his brother, and so on and so forth. The term hermano can endlessly pick out objects in the world that fit its meaning over time, space, and location.
3. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962).
4. Austin distinguishes between the locutionary act, the illocutionary act, and the perlocutionary act of speech. The locutionary act is simply saying something meaningful in a language, an utterance that conforms to the correct grammar and semantics of a language. An illocutionary act is the doing of something in the saying of it, a performative speech act. The perlocutionary act is bringing about an effect in another by your speech.
5. In fact, what the act of uttering the utterance accomplishes or attempts to accomplish may be the most important dimension to such speech.
6. Ibid., pp. 121–147.
7. H. P. Grice, Studies in the Way of Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).
8. Ibid., p. 26.
9. It’s worth noting that a given maxim can be purposefully flouted in order to convey what we want to convey. Figurative expressions work in just this way. When George Michael’s ethics teacher says she “loves” Saddam Hussein, we assume that she is purposefully exaggerating her claim in order to convey something other than love for Saddam Hussein. With attention to the context of the utterance—who is speaking, who is hearing the speech, the social and cultural location of the speech act, and so on—most of us understand the utterance as an instance of irony. The assumption is that this speaker