The evident meaning of a text seems obvious to those within an interpretive community, but, as Detective Frank Drebin illustrates, moving from the dictionary meaning to the evident one requires significant, if unnoticed, interpretive steps. In evident (i.e., ‘literal’) meaning, these unnoticed steps are those assumptions that the reader leaves unstated because he or she assumes everyone else shares them. Frank Drebin is so humorous because he is clueless about them. A tough noir cop supposedly ensconced in society and its hard-boiled dialogue, he is comically outside its interpretive
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