At wit's end: The rhetoric of humor and the ends of talk (James Thurber, Dorothy Parker, Zora Neale Hurston, Edward Albee)

At Wit's End: The Rhetoric of Humor and the Ends of Talk applies a speech-act analysis to the performance of dialogic humor in contemporary American literature, in order to engage sociopolitical issues involving gender and communication. As a multivalent play of language, humor is among the most powerful, creative, and social of speech acts. This claim for humor's potency is supported by the fact that humor is often prohibited, deemed inappropriate along lines of gender, race, and class. Thus to look closely at the strategic use of dialogic humor is to see characters confronting and challenging through language the constructed limits of individual and collective intentionality and power. I concentrate on texts which are themselves concerned with the performance of talk, including works by James Thurber, Dorothy Parker, Zora Neale Hurston, Edward Albee, and Louise Erdrich. Close attention to gender dynamics reveals a pattern in which men's humor tends toward resignation to the failure of words, while women's humor appropriates and asserts the "inappropriate" social potency of performative language play. Either discreetly or explicitly, the works by women humorists disrupt traditional speech rules and gender roles whereby women are spoken to and acted upon by humor.; The principle voices of speech-act theory, J. L. Austin and John Searle, set aside both humor and informal talk as too devious to analyze. And Jacques Derrida's reading of Austin's How To Do Things with Words challenges the very possibility of individuals to act through speech in any authoritative, intentionalistic fashion. Thus speech-act theory might seem uncooperative for the analysis undertaken here, an analysis of how to do things with humor. Yet I precede my literary analyses with a rereading of Austin and Derrida which shows that Austin himself actually uses humor as a speech act throughout his arguments, and that Derrida's counterstatment, though useful and provocative as metaphor, is based upon a misreading of Austin and a misconception of the structure and action of language. This project is thus a provocative contribution both to contemporary theoretical issues, and to the reading of contemporary American literature.