


This strategy is particularly effective if your objection makes your opponent look ridiculous or if the audience laughs.
If your opponent must make a longwinded and complicated explanation to correct you, the audience will not be disposed to listen to him.
( ,
Sat 5 Aug 2006, 9:27,
archived)
If your opponent must make a longwinded and complicated explanation to correct you, the audience will not be disposed to listen to him.

make up any number of them, when once we are in possession of the
recipe. But the art of the story-teller or the playwright does not
merely consist in concocting jokes. The difficulty lies in giving to
a joke its power of suggestion, i.e. in making it acceptable. And we
only do accept it either because it seems to be the natural product
of a particular state of mind or because it is in keeping with the
circumstances of the case. For instance, we are aware that M.
Perrichon is greatly excited on the occasion of his first railway
journey. The expression "to occur" is one that must have cropped up
a good many times in the lessons repeated by the girl before her
father; it makes us think of such a repetition. Lastly, admiration
of the governmental machine might, at a pinch, be extended to the
point of making us believe that no change takes place in the prefect
when he changes his name, and that the function gets carried on
independently of the functionary.
( ,
Sat 5 Aug 2006, 9:33,
archived)
recipe. But the art of the story-teller or the playwright does not
merely consist in concocting jokes. The difficulty lies in giving to
a joke its power of suggestion, i.e. in making it acceptable. And we
only do accept it either because it seems to be the natural product
of a particular state of mind or because it is in keeping with the
circumstances of the case. For instance, we are aware that M.
Perrichon is greatly excited on the occasion of his first railway
journey. The expression "to occur" is one that must have cropped up
a good many times in the lessons repeated by the girl before her
father; it makes us think of such a repetition. Lastly, admiration
of the governmental machine might, at a pinch, be extended to the
point of making us believe that no change takes place in the prefect
when he changes his name, and that the function gets carried on
independently of the functionary.

From the idea of travesty, a derived one, we must go back to the original idea, that of a mechanism superposed upon life. Already, the stiff and starched formality of any ceremonial suggests to us an image of this kind. For, as soon as we forget the serious object of a solemnity or a ceremony, those taking part in it give us the impression of puppets in motion. Their mobility seems to adopt as a model the immobility of a formula. It becomes automatism.
( ,
Sat 5 Aug 2006, 9:36,
archived)

But I break the flow, do continue.
( ,
Sat 5 Aug 2006, 9:38,
archived)
