Karly
Surely by now you’re sick of hearing me talk about pragmatics, but for those of you who are new here, it’s my favourite area of linguistics, which means I’m incapable of consuming a piece of media without eventually wondering what its characters are doing conversationally and, more importantly, what they’re doing wrong. I’ve been watching Only Murders in the Building and getting through the seasons at an alarming speed, and yes, I binge it, so what, but after spending this much time listening to Oliver Putnam speak, I’ve realised that the man has what can only be described as a personal vendetta against the maxim of relevance.
If you’ve managed to avoid pragmatics until now, congratulations, but unfortunately I’m about to ruin that for you. The maxim of relevance, sometimes called the maxim of relation, comes from philosopher of language H. P. Grice and his Cooperative Principle, which is essentially an attempt to explain something we all intuitively understand about conversation: when we speak to each other, we generally behave as though everyone involved is cooperating enough for the conversation to make sense.
Grice divided this into four broad maxims: quantity, quality, relation and manner, governing roughly how much information we give, whether we believe what we’re saying to be true, whether what we say is relevant and whether we say it clearly. This doesn’t mean that human beings actually follow these rules all the time, because if we did, linguists would have considerably less to talk about and dinner parties would probably be unbearable, but what makes Grice particularly useful is what happens when we don’t follow them, because speakers can violate or flout these expectations while listeners desperately try to work out why.
If I ask you whether you enjoyed a film and you answer, “The popcorn was nice,” I’m unlikely to assume that you suddenly forgot what films are. I know that you understood my question and deliberately answered it in a way that appears irrelevant, so I start looking for the meaning hiding underneath your answer: the popcorn was nice, therefore perhaps the film wasn’t, and congratulations, we have an implicature.
Oliver Putnam, meanwhile, would hear the word popcorn and immediately remember a story about the time he was thrown out of a New York restaurant with a Broadway actress in 1978 after an altercation involving somebody’s false eyelashes. Nobody was talking about that, nobody needed to know it and whatever question prompted the conversation remains unanswered, but this is Oliver’s natural conversational habitat, because Charles can be discussing a murder, Mabel can be trying to establish a timeline and somebody can quite reasonably be attempting to determine whether they’re in immediate physical danger while Oliver suddenly remembers an actor, producer, nightclub, disastrous Broadway production or vaguely implausible encounter from several decades ago which, according to him, absolutely must be shared at that precise moment.
The wonderful thing is that Oliver doesn’t seem to regard any of this as conversational derailment because, as far as he’s concerned, he’s contributing, and this distinction matters because his anecdotes aren’t actually random. In fact, by season four, Oliver gives us what is essentially a formula for producing an Oliver Putnam story when Zach Galifianakis has to play him: the key is that you want it to be true, it should preferably be set between 1960 and 1980, it needs a celebrity you’re surprised is still alive and it should involve either a nightclub that’s now an Applebee’s or a drug that no longer exists.
That’s not chaos, it’s practically a genre, because an Oliver Putnam anecdote has rules, a setting, a cast, a period and a very particular tone, even if it also has an extraordinarily loose relationship with whatever anybody else was saying immediately before it. This is where Oliver becomes much more interesting to me than a character who merely talks too much, because I don’t think he fails to understand relevance at all; Oliver understands relevance perfectly well, he simply operates according to a radically different hierarchy of it.
For most of us, conversational relevance is negotiated between speakers, so if you tell me that your train was cancelled, I understand that my next contribution should probably have something to do with your train, your journey, your inconvenience or something reasonably inferable from what you’ve just said. I don’t take the word “train” as permission to tell you about the time I saw Helena Bonham Carter at St Pancras in 2013, even if, crucially, I very much want to, but Oliver absolutely would because, to him, relevance isn’t necessarily determined by the subject currently under discussion; it’s determined by association, entertainment value and Oliver Putnam.
One word can be enough to set him off, because someone mentions a director and Oliver knows a director, someone mentions a restaurant and Oliver once had an incident in a restaurant, or someone mentions a woman called Susan and, somewhere in the recesses of his mind, Susan becomes Susan Sarandon, Susan Sarandon becomes New York theatre, New York theatre becomes 1974 and suddenly everyone is trapped inside an anecdote involving cocaine and a production of Pippin. There is a conversational path connecting all of these things, it’s just that Oliver is usually the only person who can see it.
This is one of the reasons his dialogue works so well, because if his stories were truly irrelevant, they’d eventually become exhausting rather than funny, whereas the audience can usually reconstruct the tiny associative bridge that got him there. We can see the lexical item, cultural reference or passing comment that activated some dusty corner of the Putnam archives, even while Charles and Mabel are standing there wondering how on earth they’ve ended up listening to it, which means that Oliver isn’t really abandoning relevance as much as stretching it until nobody else in the conversation recognises it anymore.
It helps that Oliver seems to live in his own glittering little world where virtually everything can be filed under one of a few important categories: ANECDOTES, BROADWAY, FAMOUS PEOPLE, DIPS and, increasingly, LORETTA DURKIN. He isn’t even really name-dropping in the conventional sense, because there’s rarely the feeling that Oliver has strategically inserted a famous person into the conversation so that everyone will be impressed by the company he’s kept; famous people simply populate his memories in the same way that everyone else’s anecdotes contain former colleagues, university friends and someone’s weird cousin, except Oliver’s weird cousin equivalent is liable to be Liza Minnelli.
This makes his relationship with relevance oddly endearing, because Charles and Mabel tend to inhabit the conversation they’re currently having while Oliver appears to inhabit every opening night, disastrous production, dinner, nightclub, celebrity encounter, theatrical feud and ill-advised party he’s attended since approximately 1968 simultaneously. Any one of them can be retrieved because somebody has said a word that, through a sequence of associations perfectly reasonable to Oliver and completely invisible to everyone else, has reminded him of it, and suddenly the murder can wait because this is exactly like something that happened backstage forty years ago.
Loretta Durkin, Meryl Streep’s formidable struggling actress, because apparently we’re expected to buy that, eventually becomes her own conversational category, because once Oliver falls in love, the already questionable boundaries of relevance deteriorate even further. If an anecdote can involve Loretta, lead to Loretta, remind him of Loretta or simply provide an opportunity to say Loretta’s name, it has apparently satisfied whatever version of the maxim of relation Oliver is personally working with, which is perhaps the most Oliver Putnam thing imaginable: even his violations of conversational cooperation eventually become romantic.
In pragmatic terms, then, we expect Oliver to remain relevant to the conversational goal, and Oliver repeatedly flouts that expectation so extravagantly that the flouting itself becomes meaningful. His apparent irrelevance tells us something every time because Oliver wants to perform, Oliver wants to connect, Oliver has remembered something about himself, Oliver is uncomfortable, Oliver needs attention or, very often, Oliver simply believes that a good story is sufficient justification for temporarily abandoning whatever everyone else was doing, and honestly, I respect the commitment.
There’s also something particularly theatrical about the way Oliver approaches conversation because he doesn’t really seem to distinguish between having the floor and having the stage. Ordinary conversation requires constant, almost invisible negotiation over whose turn it is, what information is needed and where the interaction is going, but Oliver treats a conversational turn as an opportunity, so once the spotlight has landed on him, however accidentally, there’s no guarantee he’ll return it in a timely manner.
This is probably why Charles is such a useful conversational foil for him, because Charles likes order, facts, procedures, timelines and questions with answers, while Oliver likes narrative. If Charles approaches conversation as a mechanism for exchanging information, Oliver approaches it as something closer to dinner theatre, which means the two of them are constantly negotiating not only what they’re talking about but what talking is actually for, while Mabel often ends up acting as the exhausted pragmatic referee tasked with reminding two men several decades older than her that there is, in fact, a point.
The annoying thing, at least if you’re trying to accuse Oliver of being conversationally useless, is that his irrelevance isn’t always useless at all. The Cooperative Principle depends heavily on our assumption that other people are trying, somehow, to contribute appropriately, so when somebody apparently says something irrelevant, we search for a reason and ask ourselves why they told us that, what we’re supposed to infer from it and how it connects to what came before, and Oliver makes both the other characters and the audience perform this work constantly.
Every so often, his ludicrous digression also contains precisely the association, piece of theatre knowledge, social connection or accidental observation that everyone needed, which leaves him in a delightful pragmatic grey area where he is constantly derailing the conversation but occasionally derailing it in a useful direction. His brain is essentially a filing cabinet labelled BROADWAY, CELEBRITIES, PERSONAL GRIEVANCES, DIPS and LORETTA, so there’s always a non-zero chance that rummaging around in there will produce something relevant to the murder investigation eventually.
Perhaps, then, Oliver doesn’t hate the maxim of relevance so much as reject everybody else’s definition of relevance, because Grice asks us, broadly, to make our contribution appropriate to the immediate purposes of the conversation, while Oliver Putnam appears to have interpreted “immediate purposes” as “whatever would make this interaction more interesting.” Once you accept that interpretation, his conversational behaviour becomes remarkably consistent because of course he needs to tell you about a failed musical from 1982 while you’re investigating a murder, of course the producer was insane, of course Bernadette Peters was somehow there and of course the theatre is now a Duane Reade, because you asked Oliver Putnam a question and, really, what did you think was going to happen?
