"yeah, yeah" again (another versions)

[Laurence Horn]

[from alt.usage.english]

Some time back I heard the following joke:
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A college linguistics professor was discussing double-negatives with his class. He said, "In English, a double-negative creates a positive. In some languages, such as Russian, a double-negative is still a negative. However, in no language does a double-positive make a negative.

A student in the back row called out, "Yeah, right."

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One problem with the claim that Morgenbesser's "Yeah, yeah" or "Yeah, right" came during a lecture sometime in the 1950s at Columbia by J. L. Austin is that even though the riposte sounds like Morgenbesser, the original claim doesn't sound like anything Austin would say.  And then again it would be nice to know whether Austin ever gave a lecture at Columbia sometime in the 1950s.  We know what he said at Harvard; those lectures turned into _How To Do Things With Words_, his William James lectures compiled by his students and published in 1962.  We know he lectured at Berkeley during the same period.  But is there evidence he gave a lecture at Columbia in the 1950s, other than his supposedly playing straight man to Morgenbesser?  (Now, of course, the exchange would be up on YouTube the next day and Austin couldn't deny it.)

Some sites on the internet claim that this is in fact a "true urban legend" (i.e. an urban legend that turns out to be true), but the references are all to things like "All of this is somewhat corroborated at:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_Morgenbesser, with (as far as I can tell) "somewhat" being the operative term.  Do we have a FOAF (friend of a friend) who claims to have witnessed the exchange in person?

It looks like snopes.com used to have an entry on this, but it's been scrubbed away.  Puzzling.

LH
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