This paper draws upon Horn’s reworking of Grice’s conversational maxims as Q- and R-principles in order to provide a rich pragmatic reading of British comic drama, from the London comedies of Ben Jonson, to the restoration comedy of William Wycherley to the late twentieth-century London comedy of Steven Berkoff. It is demonstrated that short-circuited implicatures (SCIs) as well as conventional and conversational implicatures operate to illuminate comic meaning for readers, both knowledgeable and unfamiliar with the historical code and the cultural milieu in which these plays may be set.