SOURCE: "The Gaiety of Gertrude Stein," in Of Huck and Alice: Humorous Writing in American Literature, University of Minnesota Press, 1983, pp. 160-99.

In the following excerpt, Schmitz explains some of Stein's puns and identifies humorous references to Alice B. Toklas in Tender Buttons.

The speculative play of Gertrude Stein's humor first appears in the carefully wrong discourse of Tender Buttons, Here is a carafe, "nothing strange," definiendum, and there is a glass, definiens. Definition is the work of knowledge. It is the first lesson in Aristotle's primer on analytic thinking, the Categories, and Gertrude Stein uses it as her mise-en-scene. A carafe is a kind of glass. So Western Thought designates the World of Things, establishes Things in the World, species into genus, and constitutes the proper text. But something happens in Gertrude Stein's definition, the spectacle of an effacement, the spectacle of a metaphor, a split in...