Paul Grice’s Theory of Meaning and his innovative program led him to analyze words, utterances composed of words, and exchanges composed of utterances and to carefully consider how words were used in utterances as well as in conversational contexts. He was determined to find the connection between, on the one hand, the way we use language and rules and, on the other hand, how interlocutors convey meaning. Along the way, he provided a framework designed to expose the inner workings of communication; central to it was his notion that communicating is about connecting with another mind. Partly because his armchair approach – which featured his Conversational Principle and the Maxims — employed figurative language as examples, experimentally-minded researchers aimed to test his ideas in the lab with such materials. To come up with predictions, experimentalists developed what became known as the Standard Pragmatic Model (the SPM), according to which the literal meaning of an utterance was processed until a maxim was violated, at which point the addressee (the participant) would effortfully come up with a new pragmatic reading. Investigations based on this model, which relied to a great extent on Reaction Times, led to doubt about Grice’s account. In this talk, I review work – on metaphor, irony and idioms — in part to show that this early (SPM-inspired) experimental approach led us down a path that did not do Grice justice and in part to provide an update on the processing of these three figures, as inspired by an Experimental Pragmatic approach.