Comedy and Philosophy

27 May 2011

[Update below. The original post was 11 March 2011.]

Sometimes comedians are on the cutting edge of philosophical inquiry.

The issue is illustrated in an anecdote about three baseball umpires who were arguing about their job. Each called balls and strikes; each was bragging as to who did the best job. Said one: “I call them as I see them—and no one can do better than that.” The second retorted, “That’s nothing: I call them as they are.” The third paused a moment, and finally added: “They ain’t nothing until I call them—and then that’s what they are.” (Doby 16–17)

That’s an old joke, recorded here in a textbook from 1954. It’s a funny joke, although Doby’s telling of it isn’t the best. But what makes it significant is that the joke is about performative utterances. British philosopher J. L. Austin formulated a line of philosophical inquiry based on speech acts, utterances that, by the very fact they are spoken, perform an action that changes our material world. Classic examples of performative utterances include “I now pronounce you husband and wife,” “I christen this ship the Queen Mary,” and the pronouncements of sports officials. The idea of performative utterances is quite insidious. At first it seems like a simple categorization of a small and quirky class of statement, but the implications for performative utterances run deep and can undermine much of what we think about language and how we use it. Austin’s speech act theory has become a productive staple of modern literary analysis.

But what interests me here is that Austin first formulated his ideas on speech act theory and peformative utterances in 1955 in a series of lectures given at Harvard and published in 1962 as the book How to Do Things With Words. The umpire joke predates this. It is included in Doby’s textbook a year before Austin gave his lectures, and the joke is undoubtedly older—Doby had to have heard it somewhere. Austin was clearly picking up on and refining a discourse that was “in the air” at the time.

For his part, Doby was skirting around the question of speech acts when he published the joke in his book:

One issue that often brings out passionate discourse in those scientists who are otherwise detached and aloof is the question as to whether the “laws” discerned by science constitute a part of the “real world,” or whether the real world can be described by atomic empirical observations and the “laws” are the products of orderly human minds (16).

I don’t have a big point here. I just find it amusing that some anonymous wag created a joke that succinctly expresses the heart of a philosophical movement some years before the philosophers discovered it.

Update:

It’s been brought to my attention that the phrase, “it ain’t nothin’ until I call it,” is commonly attributed to one of two baseball umpires, either Bill Klem (1874–1951) or Charlie Moran (1878–1949) (Shapiro 433). So the idea was floating around baseball long before Austin picked up on it.

Works cited:

Austin, J. L. How to Do Things With Words. Second edition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1975. Print.

Doby, John T. An Introduction to Social Research. Harrisburg: The Stackpole Company. 1954. Print.

Shapiro, Fred R., ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press. 2006. Print.

Logical Punctuation: Quotation Marks

16 May 2011

Ben Yagoda has a piece in Slate on the different styles for the use of quotation marks. The American, or “illogical,” style is to place the punctuation within the quotation marks (as I did here). This style is complicated because it is not consistent. Periods and commas always go inside the quotation marks; question marks and exclamation points only go inside if they are part of the quotation, otherwise they go outside. The British, or “logical”, style is to place all punctuation marks inside the quotation marks if they are part of the quotation, and outside if they are not (as I have done in this sentence). And if my Canadian style guide is accurate, true to form both styles are in use here in Canada, although the American style is used by more publishing houses. (British and American styles also reverse the priority of single and double quotation marks, but that’s a different matter.)

This difference is an excellent example of a purely arbitrary style. There is no “correct” way to punctuate a quotation. Both systems are valid. Granted, the British system is simpler and more logical, but that is rarely much of a consideration when it comes to usage. Personally, I prefer the American system. It is more visually elegant, with the quotation marks neatly enclosing the other marks, with nothing left hanging off the end of the sentence. But I recognize that this is just a personal preference that comes from having learned to write and edit using that system. I could quickly come to accept and appreciate the British system if it were foisted upon me.

Like Yagoda, I have noticed a shift toward the British system in non-professionally-edited prose. But I’m not sure if this represents an actual shift in usage or just an artifact of how I perceive it. My experience as a copy editor has grown along with the internet and access to its large corpus of non-edited prose. In years past, while aware of the difference in the style from reading British books, I probably wouldn’t have noticed differences due to lack of copy editing experience. Perhaps non-professional prose has always tended toward the logical, British style, and I have just not noticed because I wasn’t attuned to looking for such stylistic intricacies. I’d like to see some actual data on usage over the years; it would make a neat corpus linguistics project.

I agree with Yagoda’s conclusion that it seems unlikely that American publishing houses will change this style rule anytime soon. One unstated, and probably uncontemplated, reason is that the American style creates a shibboleth. It marks the professional writers and editors from the non-professionals. It’s a way for style to mark a social distinction.