Topic Proposal #1

Questions being answered:

1. What is the purpose of the argument? What does it hope to achieve?
2. What appeals or techniques does the argument use – emotional, logical, and ethical?
3. What are the facts used in the argument? What logic (logos)? What evidence? How is evidence arranged and presented?
4. What claims are advanced in the argument? What logic? What evidence? How is the evidence arranged and presented?
5. What shape does the argument take? How is the argument presented or arranged? What media does the argument use?
6. How does the language or style of the argument work to persuade an audience?

Topics: (1), (2 and 6), (3, 4, and 5)

See Blog 2 for basic sketch of paper.

Topic (1) –

Purpose: Prove that ridicule is an essential tool for human rights and could be used as a nonviolent tool to fight with.

Topic (2 and 6) –

Uses mainly a logical and an ethical (uses logic to support the ethical side) argument. Categorizes the topics and uses instances in history to support each topic that supports the need for ridicule.

Topic (3, 4, and 5) –

The facts are in history. Categorizes each idea.

Ridicule's Role in The World

In the essay Ridicule: An Instrument in the War on Terrorism Waller takes the stance for ridicule and its use to fight against enemies. He focuses on the fact that ridicule has been used several times throughout history as a way of fighting those who are oppressive or, like the Islamic poets, use it as an offensive weapon. The reason, Heller explains, that ridicule is such a useful weapon against enemies is because it can ruin the enemy’s pride, claim to justice, and image of invincibility which is “a fate worse than death”.

Ridicule is an incredible fighting weapon for the common man. It is unbreakable, and it helps to bolster confidence in those oppressed. It can be used defensively or offensively. Anybody can use it—even the common Americans who used the British’s Yankee Doodle song and made it their own in order to insult the British’s pride and to increase their own. When Muhammad became a prophet, he used ridicule consistently and aggressively against enemies, and the Islamic poets during that time wrote ridicule to psychologically attack the enemies. Heller interestingly states that an extreme and powerful leader is even more vulnerable to ridicule and the laughter it produces. Hitler, for example, was subject to ridicule all over the world: British and American boys sang anti-Hitler songs, the three stooges acted out parodies, Charlie Chaplin made the movie The Great Dictator, and even Donald Duck dreamed he was stuck in Nazi Germany.

It is truly amazing how effective of a weapon ridicule is when it makes people laugh. Ridicule is an intangible force that calms people’s fears, gives hope, and can speak the truth. Leaders who like to have absolute control over their people fear this ridicule and attempt to banish this energy that lives only within people. Fidel Castro banned counter-revolutionary jokes from all official buildings. Vladimir Putin made all mockery and insults against the president illegal, and those who broke this law were imprisoned. The Islamic Republic of Iran at one point even assassinated jokesters living out of the country. Despite these and other similar attempts to snuff out ridicule, people still wittingly mock many political issues all over the world.

The problem with this mockery is when it goes too far. It is understandable that the medicine to people’s fear, humorously exemplified in Russell Peters’s joke about terrorists (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vf-mBSE1lRs), is ridicule. Heller states “…United States is a status symbol among the world’s terrorists, dictators, and political extremists. By taking that enemy too seriously, by hyping it up as a threat, the United States is unintentionally credentializing a heretofore insignificant individual or group, and giving it the stature it needs to rise above its own society , establish itself, attract recruits, and gain influence.” Russell Peters’s joke clearly shows this fear that Americans have, a fear of something dangerous which can be generalized to other situations too. As important as this cure is to this kind of fear, without limitations, ridicule can breed contempt even after the threat is gone. After a fight, there is peace, and there is a fear that this ridicule will not allow that peace to follow thereafter the fight. Is it possible for people to let go of that ego and pride that ridicule feeds in order to help people to overcome oppressive times?

Laughing Matters: Bergson pg. 2-12 and Hemely pg. 50-62

In Laughing Matters, comedy was explained in two different ways. Bergson explains comedy philosophically by explaining the comic, laughter, and the reasons for their existence with abstract ideas. Hemley, on the other hand, approaches comedy from a down-to-earth perspective, and does so by using every day terminology and giving examples of what is considered to be funny.

Hemley's essay Relaxing the Rules of Reason is straightforward and easy to interpret. His sentences are not complex compared to Bergson's in which the reader has to pause and read sentences more than once in order to understand what message he is trying to convey. Hemley describes in his essay what can make something funny in concrete ideas. Hemley uses the anecdote of his daughter telling knock knock jokes, for example, to explain that the content of an instance can be funny for different reasons to different people. In his view, where comedy comes from can be written in simple topics: funny is where you find it, form vs. content, funny situations, and relaxing the rules of reason: daydreams, dreams, and fantasies. His simple view on comedy leads him to tell the audience that to create something funny one only has to dream of something slightly illogical and pursue it whole heartedly.

Throughout the excerpt from his essay Laughter, Bergson philosophizes on various aspects of comedy. He explains these ideas in abstract methods; his approach to comedy in his essay greatly differs from that of Hemley's. For example, Bergson describes comedy in many ways, one of them being society's reaction to something different in order for there to be a continuous reciprocal adaptation between people. He also describes comedy from an emotional reasoning point of view that requires the audience to use its imagination a bit to understand his essay. His view on society and people does not consist of basic emotions. It consists of a subconscious yearning for everyone to get along and to bring people closer together. Hemley describes this on page four and eight: "However spontaneous it seems, laughter always implies a kind of secret freemasonry, or even complicity" and "Another thing it must fear is that the members of whom it is made up, instead of aiming after an increasingly delicate adjustment of wills which will fit more and more perfectly into one another, will confine themselves to respecting simply the fundamental conditions of this adjustment: a cut-and-dried agreement among the persons will not satisfy it, it insists on a constant striving after reciprocal adaptation. Society will therefore be suspicious of all inelasticity of character…It is confronted with something that makes it uneasy…at the very most a gesture…a gesture, therefore, will be its gesture. Laughter must be something of this kind, a sort of social gesture…". His emotional reasoning point of view on comedy goes on to explaining that there is also an absence of feeling which accompanies laughter. Bergson's essay appeals to our subconscious feelings which we experience everyday without fully realizing it. We could only be aware of these feelings if we intentionally thought and dwelled on them. Hemley, however, explains comedy in what we find obvious everyday such as daydreams, quirky stories, and children's lame jokes.

Hemley's essay was obviously simple and easy to understand, as it would be for anybody. On the other hand, Bergson's essay was definitely more difficult. I had to reread passages three to four times before understanding Bergson. There was one thing, however, I did not understand. On page six in the second paragraph, he explains how the comic is supposed to affect the person within, not just the surface of them. He then goes on to give an example of this. "Let us try to picture to ourselves a certain in born lack of elasticity of both senses and intelligence...to adapt ourselves t a past and therefore imaginary situation, when we ought to be shaping our conduct in accordance with the reality which is present. This time the comic will take up its abode in the person himself; it is the person who will supply it with everything." Huh?