Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

The relevance of Grice’s maxims to teasing, ironically enough, is revealed in linguists Brown and Levinson’s 1987 classic, Politeness. Brown and Levinson carefully document how in the world’s languages speakers add a layer of politeness to their utterances when what they say risks embarrassing the listener or themselves. Politeness is achieved through systematic violations of Grice’s four maxims.

Consider the simple act of making a request. If someone asks you for the time, or directions, or to pass the rutabagas, or not to talk so loudly during the previews, that act is fraught with potential conflict. The recipient of the request is imposed upon and risks being revealed as incompetent, boorish, or disinterested in social conventions. The requester risks being perceived as intrusive and impolite. To soften the impact of requests and other potentially impolite acts such as recommendations, or criticism, people violate Grice’s maxims to communicate in more polite fashion. Say your best friend is being a bit boisterous, with elbows flying, at your Friday evening line dancing group that you’ve generously invited him to. To encourage a bit more restraint, you might politely resort to indirect questions (“Have you ever seen yourself dance?”), rhetorical questions (“Have you done line dancing before?”), metaphors (“Wow, you holler like a howler monkey”) and obliqueness (“I bet you’d be a terrific clown”). We break the rules of sincere communication to be polite. Equipped with this analysis of nonliteral communication, a careful examination of the tease reveals that teasing and politeness are surprisingly close relatives.

THE ART OF THE TEASE

 

What gives the tease the playful genius of the jester’s satire are systematic violations of Grice’s maxims. A first principle is exaggeration, which marks the playfulness of the tease by deviating from Grice’s rule of quality. Teasing can involve copious detail, excessive profanity, or an exaggerated characterization. In a study of the conversations of a very loving family, the mother referred to a young son as “horse mouth” when he did not speak clearly. We tease with dramatic and exaggerated shifts in our pitch—we mock the plaintiveness of another with high-pitched imitations, and the momentary obtuseness of another with slow-moving, low-pitched utterances. Parents will tease children about their excessive possessiveness by using vowel elongation and exaggerated pitch: “Mine!” We tease by imitating, in exaggerated form, the mannerisms of others—the bread and butter of a preteen’s around-the-clock, eye-rolling mockery of his or her parents.

Exaggeration is core to understanding “playing the dozens,” a sophisticated form of ritualized insult that the sociologist Roger Abrahams documented while spending two years living among young black kids in urban Philadelphia in the early 1960s. Abrahams found that young black males, in particular between the ages of eight and fifteen, resorted to a canon of teases—“the dozens,” oft-heard, profane poems about the target and the target’s mother. These ritualized insults occurred only among friends, and almost exclusively provoked fun and play rather than aggression. Playing the dozens, Abrahams observed, provided a context for the boys to test one another in ways that explored sexual identity and thickened their young skin as a defense against the institutionalized hostilities they faced in the inner city. The dozens is the intellectual predecessor to rap and employs exaggeration and other signals of nonliteral meaning—rhyming, repetition.

Don’t talk about my mother ’cause you’ll make me mad.

Don’t forget how many your mother had.

She didn’t have one, she didn’t have two,

She had eighty motherfuckers just like you.

I fucked your mother in a bowl of rice.

Two children jumped out shootin’ dice.

One shot seven and one shot eleven.

God damn, them children ain’t goin’ to heaven.

 

Repetition is a classic element of the tease, and violates the rule of quantity. If a friend says you are a really good neck rubber, you blush with pride. If she says you are a really, really, really, really outrageously fantastic neck rubber, you are likely to bristle a bit, recall questionable massage techniques—the use of your elbows and your nose—you’ve experimented with, wonder what her point is, and rise to defend yourself.