We're Talking about L.A.N.G.U.A.G.E

In this masterpiece from 1989, Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie (who later starred in House) send up literary theory, Chomskyan sentences, and structural linguistics. I think I will never grow tired of “Hold the newsreader's nose squarely, waiter, or friendly milk will countermand my trousers.” It's particularly good for breaking the ice in a literary theory class. I had the good fortune to teach pre-twentieth-century theory most recently (Plato, wow, seriously), so there was no need to wheel this out.

But the skit is so much more than that. The examples Fry (dressed in classic Cambridge-style turtleneck) gives of “what language is” remind me not so much of Saussure as Heidegger. (In particular I'm thinking of the essay “Language.”) “Language is a spluttering match held to a frosted pane ... It's cobwebs, long since overrun by an old wellington boot.” The surprise of the final image is not only to do with the catachretic inversion (it should of course be the boot overrun by cobwebs)—a clever play on words that decisively separates human language from anything like reference to the actual. It has to do with the way the sentence is a kind of allegory for language as such—that in speaking it becomes “overrun” with the strangeness of a thing-like presence whose heavy shadow looms into it.

Fry's list of things is also, of course, a Latour Litany...

“Language to you is more than a form of communication?” asks Laurie. Isn't this the wager of L.A.N.G.U.A.G.E poetry, which tries to hold up to the light the object-ness of language itself, the fact that it withdraws ...