Powerful Wit

In my everyday life I should probably use more rhetoric than I do. There is no doubt about its effectiveness, yet one needs to know how and when to use it. I barely use its more sophisticated tools and instead I use humor in conversations with my friends. When I am able to pull off a with joke it is probably best, but usually these are facetious. Situational humor is hard to spot. My lack of rhetorical speaking is undeniable: the most humor I use is a "relatively ineffective form of persuasion" (p. 97). Fortunately I never say jokes while I argue or talk with a special audience. I mostly say these jokes when I am with my friends… Oh, and there is also some bantering when we get too childish.  

I am trying to recall any jokes I have said in the last days, but it is difficult to remember what exactly these were. Probably they were not even funny. The only one I can remember was not wit, facetious, or even bantering. It was actually an urbane joke that a friend pulled off by paying with two totally unrelated words. This was actually a very bad joke that him and I laugh because we have a very childish and immature sense of humor. Unfortunately this is the only joke I can remember right now. When a classmate asked if an assignment had to have fallacious language my friend asked back, "fellatios". The adjective "fallacious", which describes an argument that has fallacies, sounded very similar to the noun "fellatio", which describes a sexual behavior. The (bad) joke was asking back that word. It was a very stupid joke, but I cannot deny that we instantly began laughing. My friend did not even think what he was saying, it simply came out because some perverted part of his brain automatically commented on a mispronunciation. Or maybe it was even pronounced correctly, but he unconsciously made that very bad joke. It was out of context, yet it reminds me of the purpose of rhetoric. 

An arguer should aim to persuade the audience and in this case my friend got me to think he was funny. Still, humor is most important when one must convince an audience that one is better than another arguer. Possibly when one must outwit an opponent.