Philosophy of Comedy, Grice, and I don't know anything

So, moments ago I used a joke about Paul Grice. I have to be honest with all three of you. I've never read Grice's stuff, or at least I don't remember reading any of it extensively. It's not right, right? The joke gets thrown around a lot in a few circles I run in and it's the following: "So-and-so didn't read their Grice." Basically, it means that so-and-so didn't understand context sensitive statements uttered by others because they were ignoring the conversational implicatures.

Again, dear reader, you're going to have to forgive me but I went to the SEP to check my facts and get straight in my head some of the details of his work. As I was reading I discovered and interesting case of statements, those kinds where the utterance has no meaning. Things like
(1): My neighbors three year old daughter is an orange.

My first thought was that it made sense for Grice to claim that some statements contain no meaning. Then I thought about how statements like this are very often jokes, but then I thought about how few people are going to laugh at sentences like (1) without extra content like sarcasm, in general- body language, and most importantly context


Too lame to finish this but i feel the pull of posting something.... I was going to try and develop a theory of comedy through grice's work

Current Economic Data

So here's just some facts from the recent data from BEA and BLS

Real gross domestic product decreased at an annual rate of 1.0 percent in the second quarter of 2009, (that is, from the first quarter to the second), according to the "advance" estimate released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. In the first quarter, real GDP decreased 6.4 percent.

Nonfarm payroll employment continued to decline in July (-247,000), and the unemployment rate was little changed at 9.4 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today.

unemployed persons was 14.5 million =
long-term unemployed 5.0 million.
part time for economic reasons was little changed in July at 8.8 million.
2.3 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force
796,000 discouraged workers


The Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) increased 0.9 percent in June before seasonal adjustment, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. Over the last 12 months the index has fallen 1.4 percent, as a 25.5 percent decline in the energy index has more than offset increases of 2.1 percent in the food index and 1.7 percent in the index for all items less food and energy.