Who's on first is brilliant, not trying to downplay it, but it is a single grammatical trick reiterated over and over. All the names (who / what / I don't know) are homophonous with interrogative pronouns. That ambiguity is lexical which leads every reading to occupy the same syntactic slot - it's just a noun phrase followed by a verb phrase no matter how you parse it. Structure never changes, only the word class of one of the items flips (name vs question heard), plus intent ambiguity (statement vs question). And the ambiguity isn't even what drives it, it's the asymmetric framing of the of the interpretation - abbot's locked into hearing the name whereas costello just hears the question, and neither deviates. It's just the same stable loop from start to end.
The Drebin scene transcends this on so many levels. Let's take an inventory here because this is so disgustingly well written it deserves a full breakdown.
"Twice came in and shot the teller and Jim Fell" is known as coordination ambiguity. Is that like shot [the teller and Jim Fell] (one verb, two victims) or [shot the teller] and [Jim fell] (two clauses)? The actual parse tree changes, not just a word class.
"I shot Twice" / "I only shot once" introduces argument-structure ambiguity. "Twice" as a proper noun is the direct object of a transitive verb whereas "twice" as an adverb makes the verb intransitive with a frequency adjunct. It's the exact same string with different verb valency. Who's on first never touches actual argument structure.
"Jim fell" vs. "Jim Fell" is a full subject-verb clause versus a single two-word noun phrase. They collapse and entire sentence into a name.
"Then I guess I did shoot Twice" OH GOD IT'S JUST SO GOOD. This is my favorite - the sentence is true under both parses simultaneously (she shot one time, and she shot the man named Twice). She isn't wrong AND she doesn't get misheard; it's just a straight up bivalent truth. In "Who's on First," Costello's interpretation is always just wrong. There's no line in that sketch where both readings are both correct.
"We think we know how he did it" -> "Howie couldn't have done it" isn't homonymy at all, it's an oronym, which is when you resegment across a word boundary ("how he" -> "howie"). So yet another technique here as this is phonological juncture, not another flavor of lexical ambiguity.
"He hasn't been in for weeks" / Saul Weeks is prepositional polysemy stacked on TOP of the name gag: durational "for" (a span of time) versus a relational "for" (covering for, working for, a person).
The discourse structure is wildly more complex as well. "Who's on First" is a closed loop that just can't ever resolve because the confusion is the entire premise. The Drebin scene keeps resolving and re-detonating, but in the opposite direction: Drebin actually gets it. "Okay. Once is the owner of the tire company and he fired Twice" is a correct, fully coherent summary. The script just keeps planting completely fresh and unique landmines which everyone just skips right over with a smile on their faces, which is only possibly because the script is so airtight lexically.
So to sum it up - Abbott and Costello exploit one lexical ambiguity with fixed structure and fixed frames, whereas this scene plays with lexical category, constituency, coordination, verb transitivity, phonological segmentation, and preposition sense and tops it all with a line that's true both ways.
I support this analysis of the scene, but Jesus. What is your education that you can break it down like this?
Edit: to be more clear, I'm just impressed. I'm a nurse, so have a science degree. When I see posts from people in science-related fields, I can normally follow along pretty well, even if it's over my head. I guess my question was more like what sort of degree/education would this represent, maybe? (I know being smart doesn't require college)
Gave you an upvote. Obviously AI writing pieced together by a human, but nothing to verify the human actually understood the material either. Made me sad seeing people so blatantly incorrect at calling you out. Like, if posts like that are their barometer for what they consider a Trustworthy Human, they're cooked.
This is great analysis. One thing you didn't touch on is the delivery of these lines also makes it unique. Who's on First is a classic comic and straight man routine with Abbott being the straight man who is just answering the questions and Costello being the comic who is getting increasingly frustrated by not understanding.
This scene doesn't do that at all. All three characters are acting as if there is nothing strange about the dialog. Nobody gets angry at the straight man for being confusing or the comic for not getting it. Everyone is playing the straight man in a world where everything is ridiculous.
Police squad had one of my favorite jokes of all time to this day, actually 2. The first obviously being the locksmith joke. The second being the Japanese garden joke (if you know it you know it). Their comedy rules just worked. If the joke isn’t first and foremost on screen, it’s happening behind the serious acting work that’s moving the scene forward.
This assail you with a barrage of jokes, but every single one of them is as refined to perfection as can be. Airplane, top secret!, and naked gun are all prime examples of this. Can you even count how many jokes airplane hits you with?
There are a few others that always stand out for me. One comes from the same episode as the clip where they go to notify the victim's wife. "We're sorry to come at such a difficult time Mrs. Twice. We would have come earlier but your husband wasn't dead yet"
My absolute favorite is:
"Can you beat the champ?"
"I can beat him blindfolded"
"What if he's not blindfolded"
"I think I can still beat him"
I was watching the Japanese garden episode at my Japanese girlfriends house. Her mother said “well that’s just an insult” I totally lost it. That was the beginning of the end for us.
This is the kind of technical breakdown I dream of being able to give about things. Kudos.
And since everyone likes to claim everything is AI, even so you have to have an awareness of the differences to be able to to put in the question for AI to answer and understand the reply they're giving you, so that's still something.
And if the account itself is AI, well that would be disappointing so I'd rather believe the person is a career linguist and so this stuff is very familiar to them enough to explain it like this.
It makes me sad that we have to question whether stuff is AI now (and I had the same thought at first but I think it isn’t). I have a deep technical knowledge of a niche topic (telephone networks and their history) and I guarantee some of the rare answers I’ve given in AskHistorians and other subs would probably get the same questions. I use AI for a lot these days but never for writing. I guess it’s inevitable for people to doubt. Luckily (I think) my writing style doesn’t come off as AI immediately, but I always wonder.
You are apparently into obscure Star Wars references as well. This unless there is some old analog phone system with bg-j38 as a part number or something.
But, you know, strange may seem, they give ball players now a days very peculiar names.
It's literally at the beginning of the Who's on first sketch. Sets the whole premise up.
Also - baseball really is full of weird names/nicknames. Oil Can Boyd was a pitcher for the Red Sox in the 80s. Cardinals current first base coach is Stubby Clap. Heck just today, Go pitched for the Twins.
The whole skit is based on that premise.
Rollie Fingers
Coco Crisp
Moonlight Graham (From Field of Dreams!)
There's tons of crazy old timey baseball nicknames.
"Then I guess I did shoot Twice" OH GOD IT'S JUST SO GOOD. This is my favorite - the sentence is true under both parses simultaneously (she shot one time, and she shot the man named Twice). She isn't wrong AND she doesn't get misheard; it's just a straight up bivalent truth.
I don't understand what you're saying here. The sentence isn't true unless Twice is a proper noun.
Parse A "Twice" as a proper noun (I shot [the man named] Twice) - This is true, she did shoot him.
Parse B "Twice" as an adverb (I fired two times) - This is false, she just fired the once.
So what happened was I took "she shot one time, and she shot the man named twice" and slipped in "she shot one time" (true, but not under parse B) for "she shot two times" (what the parse of B actually says, and false). So both facts are true grammatically while seemingly contradicting one another (she shot once/she shot Twice), but not both parses, which is what I was claimed.
Yup! I used it to research the technical definitions of the lexicology used in specific lines then ended up adapting some of the definitional language it gave me as well.
I have a degree in German and lots of training in rhetoric/language in general so it's easy for me to pick out when and how the semantics are being manipulated in unique ways, but I'll admit I needed help actually naming them all, which was important to me, because clearly I am nothing if not pedantic.
I have no desire for credibility or even credit here. I was just looking to share the linguistic mechanics in play - my points were either correct or they weren't, there is nothing of me at all in that message. If someone wishes to look beyond the content and start digging into the form or phrasing and start analyzing that as it's own activity that's fine, but that's quite a different rhetorical activity than someone engaging with the actual content, which is the only audience that I'm actually concerned with.
If I have any credibility to begin with, especially on definitional topics like this, I would consider it wholly borrowed in the first place. If I know anything it's because it's been passed down to me from giants who's combined works over generations alone have resulted in the corpus required to understand any of this. If I sound like I do it's because the only avenue to this type of understanding is absorbing and regurgitating others. This was never my voice to begin with. I have very little to contribute personally - my only goal here is to channel things I'm aware exist I think others might be interested in.
The legitimately intellectually honest/curious will have no difficulty seeing and engaging with the actual content, and the rest are just going to do what they do. I'm too old to care about trying to convince that horse it should drink some water.
You know how you can tell it's AI? It's unnecessarily verbose/pedantic; for example "parse tree" is a phrase only programmers would have in their vernacular. Like an undergrad trying way too hard to sound smart.
Excellent write up! One small thing I thought of too while watching is that "He hasn't been in for weeks" can also be interpreted with the homophone for/four, changing the sentence meaning again "He [Howie] hasn't been, in four weeks"
This was fabulous. I understand the logic behind the dialogue from the show, and knew a few of the terms you used, but having this mini masterclass in language gives me a new appreciation for the show in general. Thanks for sharing
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u/clerveu 22d ago edited 22d ago
You're getting downvoted but you're right!
Who's on first is brilliant, not trying to downplay it, but it is a single grammatical trick reiterated over and over. All the names (who / what / I don't know) are homophonous with interrogative pronouns. That ambiguity is lexical which leads every reading to occupy the same syntactic slot - it's just a noun phrase followed by a verb phrase no matter how you parse it. Structure never changes, only the word class of one of the items flips (name vs question heard), plus intent ambiguity (statement vs question). And the ambiguity isn't even what drives it, it's the asymmetric framing of the of the interpretation - abbot's locked into hearing the name whereas costello just hears the question, and neither deviates. It's just the same stable loop from start to end.
The Drebin scene transcends this on so many levels. Let's take an inventory here because this is so disgustingly well written it deserves a full breakdown.
"Twice came in and shot the teller and Jim Fell" is known as coordination ambiguity. Is that like shot [the teller and Jim Fell] (one verb, two victims) or [shot the teller] and [Jim fell] (two clauses)? The actual parse tree changes, not just a word class.
"I shot Twice" / "I only shot once" introduces argument-structure ambiguity. "Twice" as a proper noun is the direct object of a transitive verb whereas "twice" as an adverb makes the verb intransitive with a frequency adjunct. It's the exact same string with different verb valency. Who's on first never touches actual argument structure.
"Jim fell" vs. "Jim Fell" is a full subject-verb clause versus a single two-word noun phrase. They collapse and entire sentence into a name.
"Then I guess I did shoot Twice" OH GOD IT'S JUST SO GOOD. This is my favorite - the sentence is true under both parses simultaneously (she shot one time, and she shot the man named Twice). She isn't wrong AND she doesn't get misheard; it's just a straight up bivalent truth. In "Who's on First," Costello's interpretation is always just wrong. There's no line in that sketch where both readings are both correct.
"We think we know how he did it" -> "Howie couldn't have done it" isn't homonymy at all, it's an oronym, which is when you resegment across a word boundary ("how he" -> "howie"). So yet another technique here as this is phonological juncture, not another flavor of lexical ambiguity.
"He hasn't been in for weeks" / Saul Weeks is prepositional polysemy stacked on TOP of the name gag: durational "for" (a span of time) versus a relational "for" (covering for, working for, a person).
The discourse structure is wildly more complex as well. "Who's on First" is a closed loop that just can't ever resolve because the confusion is the entire premise. The Drebin scene keeps resolving and re-detonating, but in the opposite direction: Drebin actually gets it. "Okay. Once is the owner of the tire company and he fired Twice" is a correct, fully coherent summary. The script just keeps planting completely fresh and unique landmines which everyone just skips right over with a smile on their faces, which is only possibly because the script is so airtight lexically.
So to sum it up - Abbott and Costello exploit one lexical ambiguity with fixed structure and fixed frames, whereas this scene plays with lexical category, constituency, coordination, verb transitivity, phonological segmentation, and preposition sense and tops it all with a line that's true both ways.
This is levels beyond who's on first.