Illustrations and Examples of Gricean Pragmatic Principles in Action

July 7, 2019 3:02 AM

I'm looking for humorous, interesting examples from television, film etc. of Grice's maxims and sub-maxims being violated, or flouted to generate a conversational implicatures. Does anyone know of any good examples?

There are existing examples on Youtube but they didn't strike me as particularly memorable or funny (bad sitcoms tend to be where they are all clustered).

posted by ashaw to Writing & Language (9 answers total)

Most of "Gilmore Girls" dialogue?
posted by wenestvedt at 6:46 AM on July 7, 2019

This is based on my personal experience rather than from a film/TV show, but it seems apropos so I'll add it just in case: When I read the Maxim of Quantity entry ("Do not make your contribution more informative than is required"), I immediately though of a garrulous co-worker on my company's internal IT team, about whom another co-worker once said to me, "If you ask him how to print a file, he'll tell you how to build a printer."
posted by Greg_Ace at 11:13 AM on July 7, 2019 [1 favorite]

From Twitter: My "Not involved in human trafficking" T-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt.
posted by Lexica at 11:31 AM on July 7, 2019

The Simpsons is densely packed with them:

Lionel Hutz: Uh-oh. We've drawn Judge Snyder.
Marge: Is that bad?
Hutz: Well, he's had it in for me ever since I kinda ran over his dog.
Marge: You did?
Hutz: Well, replace the word “kinda” with the word "repeatedly," and the word "dog" with "son."

Probably the entire Steamed Hams bit is a giant Gricean violation for laffs.
posted by overeducated_alligator at 12:07 PM on July 7, 2019 [1 favorite]

Any time someone tells a joke within earshot of Spock, he points out that they've violated a maxim of conversation.
posted by WizardOfDocs at 1:07 PM on July 7, 2019

There's a scene in Nichijou, right after Yuuko's traumatic experience of not knowing how to order anything at a fancy new coffee shop, where she sees a display for "Unbearably super-hot chef's choice chicken bars" at a convenience store. Yuuko thinks that the store is following the maxim of manner and that the entire description is a required part of the name, so she naturally tries to order an "Unbearably Super-Hot Chef's Choice Chicken Bar". However, the clerk, who knows that everything before "chicken bars" is just overly effusive marketing, thinks that Yuuko is flouting the maxim and making fun of the display, so she replies, "Miss, give me a break."
posted by J.K. Seazer at 2:28 PM on July 7, 2019

The Energy Vampire in What We Do in the Shadows (the show, not the film) flouts maxims in just about every conversation.
posted by iamkimiam at 3:38 PM on July 7, 2019 [1 favorite]

The Good Place is another source of maxims being flouted and/or violated by just about everyone.
posted by iamkimiam at 3:41 PM on July 7, 2019

The final gag in this scene from a Pink Panther movie involves a violation of -- I believe -- the maxim of relevance and that of quantity. (The contribution of the hotel keeper gives less information than would be required to answer the inspector's question given the implicit assumption the inspector makes about the dog which one ought to be able to interpret correctly out of considerations of relevance but which the hotel keeper does not correct -- until the punchline, when it is too late. This gag can also be seen as presenting a conflict between high- and low-context communication. The inspector's question is misunderstood from a low-context perspective in which more disambiguating information must be explicitly included in a message than a high-context perspective would deem necessary.)
posted by bertran at 12:45 AM on July 8, 2019