Language and Laughter: Comic Diction in the Plays of Bernard Shaw by John A. Mills (review)

236 MODERN DRAMA September LANGUAGE AND LAUGHTER: COMIC DICTION IN THE PLAYS OF BER· NARD SHAW, by John A. Mills. Tucson, Ariz.: University of Arizona Press, 1969. $6.50. This is an interesting book on the use of language in the works of George Bernard Shaw, one of the seminal literary figures of the twentieth century. John A. Mills examines the words and phrases that Shaw uses in several of his most important plays. It is surprising that Shaw's way with words has received so little systematic, evaluatory analysis. Most of the recent scholarship of a linguistic nature, has been rather superficial. Professor Mills does not see any conflict in the assumption that if a work is comic it cannot, by that very fact, be of any genuine weight. He shows that Shaw is essentially a didactic playwright with an unusual command of the English language , and at the same time a skillful comic artist. Shaw is an example of a dramatist who can write a play that can pro.voke both laughter and thought, not just alternately but simultaneously. Mills examines how Shaw uses language to produce laughter, which in tum heightens the seriousness of the dialogue. This work is well organized even though it still has the aura of an academic dissertation. Mills examines Shaw's use of various dialects, especially cockney vocabulary and syntax. We find this the most stimulating chapter of the book. His treatment of the ways in which Shaw makes comic capital of various literary styles and of professional jargon is also most informative. while his chapter dealing with the comic effectiveness of the repetition of words and of punning is good. The reader of this small book is encouraged to turn to the plays themselves to examine and evaluate Mill's conclusions in the light of the text. Shaw is shown to have relied heavily on a satiric use of the language of romantic fiction and stage melodrama in the delineation of such a character as Sergius in Arms and the Man. This book also investigates a group of Shavian characters who are given comic coloration by making them linguistic automatons, mindlessly repeating cliches and formulas. In such characters, Mills believes the "vocal mechanism slips the cog which should link it to consciousness, and goes on spinning independently, a machine with no human agency to run it." Though relatively broad in themselves, most of Shaw's language jokes are shown to be organically related to his most refined comic insights. His use of comic diction reveals him as a complete man of the theatre, willing and able, like most great playwrights, to take the proven, stock devices of the popular stage and join them to his higher purposes. Sottle of the most significat insight the readers obtain from Language and Laughter is due to the fact that Professor Mills has had experience both an actor and a director of Shaw's plays. E. H. MIKHAIL University of Lethbridge ...