The biggest problem with Joel Sherzer’s Speech Play and Verbal Art is that it is so darn hard to read in a straightforward, linear way. The book is so packed with examples of verbal play in several languages that the eye desperately wants to leap from example to example, enjoying the play and skipping the explanatory text in between.

Indulging in this playful impulse is an education in itself. One could learn, just by relating examples to subheads, what is meant by iconicity, reduplication, play languages, punning, jokes and riddles, verbal dueling, figures of speech, repetition, parallelism, code-switching, poetics and metaphor. Not only this, but one might learn how these work differently—both because of structural and contextual differences—in Bali, Brazil (both among Portuguese and Kuna speakers), France, Latin America, and the United States.

When one finally breaks free of the play frame and turns to the connecting text, one is rewarded by a clear, coherent argument about the interplay of language structure and verbal play. Sherzer emphasizes the extent to which such play is central to language. Building on the work of Roman Jakobson, he focuses on the ways speech play seizes on the potentialities of language structure and exploits them to social, cultural, and aesthetic ends. The goal is to use speech play to offer “a view of language structure and language use as creative, adaptive, and emergent, in which grammar and the sociolinguistic situation provide potentials which are actualized and exploited in discourse” (p. 70).

In the introduction, Sherzer explores the meaning of play and its relationship to language structure. “While there is always some play for play’s sake, play often involves culture exploring and working out both its essence and the limits of its possibilities” (p. 8). He expands on this argument in the second chapter, The Play of Grammar and the Grammar of Play. Emphasizing iconic forms of word play such as reduplication and sound symbolism, he looks at the considerable freedom to play that grammatical rules provide.

Chapter 3 examines the ways that such freedom to play are exploited in social interaction, and how these come to be grouped into genres. The shift “From Speech Play to Verbal Art” is explored in chapter 4. And chapter 5 explores, albeit in a very cursory manner, some of the ways contexts are linked to genres in the Balinese, Kuna, French, Latin American, and North American contexts from which his examples throughout the book have been primarily drawn.

There are flaws in the book, most of which revolve around a tendency to write in ways that appear to attribute agency to culture without people as agents. The quotation above from page 8, in which culture works itself out, is an example. One result of this approach is a lack of attention to performers of verbal art. A related result is a failure to draw attention to the role of verbal play in the use of power. I am thinking of how the Ayatollah Khomeini constructed particular metaphors to achieve domination over his clerical rivals by rhetorically constructing a worldview, or Ronald Reagan’s use of the metaphor of war as a way to shift public discourse about drugs in American society or George W. Bush’s use of forms of verbal art in his attempt to restore a bipolar worldview.

Sherzer touches on power in his discussions of the range of potential meanings of such speech genres as ethnic jokes, but I would have liked to have seen this dimension of speech play explored more thoroughly. Sherzer is good at showing the nontrivial nature of seemingly trivial bits of language play, but his examples never link these to the exercise of power by particular situated agents who employ the potentialities of language creatively to achieve particular ends.

But perhaps this is too much to ask of this little gem of a book that, like “the Kuna place” described to him by one of his Kuna hosts, is not a serious place but “a talking place and a laughing place” (p. 154).