Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill.original_ [88]
Lange: But you upstaged me because you—when—I didn’t know—I didn’t know any other funny people were gonna talk. And then you went up and killed it before they married each other and—
Kimmel: Well you should have known about that. They asked me to do a little thing at the ceremony—
Lange: Right.
Kimmel: Like the day before so I did a little prayer for them.
Lange: That was nice—it was—you were funny.
Kimmel: I didn’t mean to, uh, step on your toes there, I didn’t want to ruin it. But you do owe me and I’ll tell you why…
Lange attempts to reframe the conversation by saying that Kimmel upstaged him. Kimmel, like Lange, dismisses the praise, saying that the prayer that Lange labeled “very funny” was really a “little thing” that he had put together the “day before.” Kimmel then clumsily changes the subject in order to draw attention away from himself. This presents a case in which a compliment comes across more as an accusation than a statement of praise. [The writer has offered an alternative explanation for a possible contradiction with her lens:] One possible explanation for the desire to dismiss and minimize praise is that compliment-giving is not the selfless act in may appear to be, but is, in fact, pure one-upmanship. [The writer locates a theory in her lens that would support the explanation:] According to Tannen, “Giving praise, like giving information is also inherently asymmetrical. It too frames the speaker as one-up, in a position to judge someone else’s performance” (Understand 69). Thus, accepting praise may force the man on the receiving end of the praise to surrender supremacy to the praise-giver. By negating or avoiding praise, hierarchy can be reserved.
The type of combative self-deprecation that Kimmel and Lange display in this conversation, in which one man accuses the other of “upstaging” him, also indicates that self-deprecation is used to display magnanimity. In That’s Not What I Meant, Tannen writes, “It’s an ironic twist by which you want to be magnanimous but want credit for it too—and taking credit for being magnanimous reframes the other person’s behavior as depriving you” (89). Self-deprecating humor operates in a similar way. One is not merely telling an embarrassing personal anecdote or using himself as the target of a joke, but, on the “metamessage” level, which looks beyond the surface of a statement to determine “what we’re doing when we speak” (Understand 32), he is telling his partner (and in the case of talk shows, the audience as well) that he is being generous, sacrificing his own pride in order to compliment the other man. This is evident in Kimmel and Lange’s conversation. Both men combine compliments of the other man with denunciations of themselves, suggesting that such a combination is a generous and giving gesture. [The writer ably concludes her analysis with a compressed restatement about competition:] The real competition is not about which man was funnier at the wedding, but over which man can better compliment the other’s performance.
In Conan O’Brien’s conversation with actor Kiefer Sutherland, O’Brien repeatedly pokes fun at his own weakness in order to emphasize Sutherland’s toughness, a trait for which the actor is known. It may appear that O’Brien is putting himself down, but at the same time he displays one-upmanship. When O’Brien is being self-deprecating, downplaying his own skills in relation to Sutherland’s, Sutherland becomes the recipient of O’Brien’s generosity. O’Brien, thus, comes out of the conversation in a hierarchical position to Sutherland, for he was the one giving, and not receiving, the praise and generosity.
[The writer now extends her category of self-deprecation to include another form, teasing:] Teasing and self-deprecation may appear to go hand-in-hand. In teasing, man A makes fun of man B, and in self-deprecation,