The importance of Being Impolite: The verbalization of grief as productive impoliteness in Ricky Gervais' After Life

This paper deals with the normative and censorial aspects of politeness as a linguistic and social practice in the English context. While it is recognized that politeness aims at maintaining social harmony, avoiding conflicts and deflating aggression, it can also be looked at as a form of social control, especially when topics which are potentially sensitive or embarrassing are explicitly avoided or mitigated through white lies or understatement. I thus examine the functions of impo-liteness in Ricky Gervais’ TV series After Life [2019], to show how the main subversive element of the series lies within language use and with the breaking of norms which concern the verbali-zation of grief. As a matter of fact, the discourse brought about in the series through the use of impoliteness seems to call out for a change in cultural assumptions with regard to the expression of grief and, more in general, of negative emotions, in the English culture. I thus introduce the concept of productive impoliteness, which refers to all those manifestations of impoliteness which aim at subverting linguistic or cultural impositions originating from social norms rather than attacking any interlocutor’s face.