SATIRE, IRONY, SARCASM, HUMOR

In talking about definition, deduction, and evidence, we’ve been talking about means of rational persuasion. However, as mentioned earlier, there are also other means of persuasion. Force is an example. If X kicks Y, threatens to destroy Y’s means of livelihood, or threatens Y’s life, X may persuade Y to cooperate. But writers, of course, cannot use such kinds of force on their readers. Instead, one form of irrational but sometimes highly effective persuasion is satire — that is, witty ridicule. A cartoonist may persuade viewers that a politician’s views are unsound by caricaturing (thus ridiculing) her appearance or by presenting a grotesquely distorted (funny, but unfair) picture of the issue she supports.

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Satiric artists often use caricature; satiric writers, also seeking to persuade by means of ridicule, often use verbal irony. This sort of irony contrasts what is said and what is meant. For instance, words of praise may actually imply blame (when Shakespeare’s Cassius says, “Brutus is an honorable man,” he wants his hearers to think that Brutus is dishonorable), and words of modesty may actually imply superiority (“Of course, I’m too dumb to understand this problem”). Such language, when heavy-handed, is sarcasm (“You’re a great guy,” said to someone who won’t lend the speaker ten dollars). If it’s witty and clever, we call it irony rather than sarcasm.

Although ridicule isn’t a form of argument (because it isn’t a form of reasoning), passages of ridicule, especially verbal irony, sometimes appear in argument essays. These passages, like reasons or like appeals to the emotions, are efforts to persuade the reader to accept the writer’s point of view. The key to using humor in an argument is, on the one hand, to avoid wisecracking like a smart aleck, and on the other hand, to avoid mere clownishness. Later in this chapter, we print an essay by George F. Will that is (or seeks to be) humorous in places. You be the judge.

EMOTIONAL APPEALS

It is sometimes said that good argumentative writing appeals only to reason, never to emotion, and that any emotional appeal is illegitimate and irrelevant. “Tears are not arguments,” the Brazilian writer Machado de Assis said. Logic textbooks may even stigmatize with Latin labels the various sorts of emotional appeal — for instance, argumentum ad populam (appeal to the prejudices of the mob, as in “Come on, we all know that schools don’t teach anything anymore”) and argumentum ad misericordiam (appeal to pity, as in “No one ought to blame this poor kid for stabbing a classmate because his mother was often institutionalized for alcoholism and his father beat him”).

True, appeals to emotion may distract from the facts of the case; they may blind the audience by, in effect, throwing dust in its eyes or by provoking tears.

LEARNING FROM SHAKESPEARE A classic example is in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, when Marc Antony addresses the Roman populace after Brutus, Cassius, and others have assassinated Caesar. The real issue is whether Caesar was becoming tyrannical (as the assassins claim) and would have curtailed the freedom of the Roman people. Antony turns from the evidence and stirs the mob against the assassins by appealing to its emotions. In the ancient Roman biographical writing that Shakespeare drew on, Sir Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, Plutarch says this about Antony:

perceiving that his words moved the common people to compassion, … [he] framed his eloquence to make their hearts yearn [i.e., grieve] the more, and, taking Caesar’s gown all bloody in his hand, he laid it open to the sight of them all, showing what a number of cuts and holes it had upon it. Therewithal the people fell presently into such a rage and mutiny that there was no more order kept.

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Here are a few extracts from Antony’s speeches in Shakespeare’s play. Antony begins by asserting that he will speak only briefly:

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;

I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.

After briefly offering insubstantial evidence that Caesar gave no signs of behaving tyrannically (e.g., “When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept”), Antony begins to play directly on his hearers’ emotions. Descending from the platform so that he may be in closer contact with his audience (like a modern politician, he wants to work the crowd), he calls attention to Caesar’s bloody toga:

If you have tears, prepare to shed them now.

You all do know this mantle; I remember

The first time ever Caesar put it on:

’Twas on a summer’s evening, in his tent,

That day he overcame the Nervii.

Look, in this place ran Cassius’ dagger through;

See what a rent the envious Casca made;

Through this, the well-belovèd Brutus stabbed….

In these few lines, Antony accomplishes the following:

In fact, Antony was not at the battle, and he did not join Caesar until three years later.

Antony doesn’t mind being free with the facts; his point here is not to set the record straight but to stir the mob against the assassins. He goes on, daringly but successfully, to identify one particular slit in the garment with Cassius’s dagger, another with Casca’s, and a third with Brutus’s. Antony cannot know which dagger made which slit, but his rhetorical trick works.

Notice, too, that Antony arranges the three assassins in climactic order, since Brutus (Antony claims) was especially beloved by Caesar:

Judge, O you gods, how dearly Caesar loved him!

This was the most unkindest cut of all;

For when the noble Caesar saw him stab,

Ingratitude, more strong than traitor’s arms,

Quite vanquished him. Then burst his mighty heart….

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Nice. According to Antony, the noble-minded Caesar — Antony’s words have erased all thought of the tyrannical Caesar — died not from wounds inflicted by daggers but from the heartbreaking perception of Brutus’s ingratitude. Doubtless there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. Let’s all hope that if we are ever put on trial, we’ll have a lawyer as skilled in evoking sympathy as Antony.

ARE EMOTIONAL APPEALS FALLACIOUS? Antony’s oration was obviously successful in the play and apparently was successful in real life, but it is the sort of speech that prompts logicians to write disapprovingly of attempts to stir feeling in an audience. (As mentioned earlier, the evocation of emotion in an audience is pathos, from the Greek word for “emotion” or “suffering.”) There is nothing inherently wrong in stimulating an audience’s emotions when attempting to establish a claim, but when an emotional appeal confuses the issue being argued or shifts attention away from the facts, we can reasonably speak of the fallacy of emotional appeal.

No fallacy is involved, however, when an emotional appeal heightens the facts, bringing them home to the audience rather than masking them. In talking about legislation that would govern police actions, for example, it’s legitimate to show a photograph of the battered, bloodied face of an alleged victim of police brutality. True, such a photograph cannot tell the whole truth; it cannot tell if the subject threatened the officer with a gun or repeatedly resisted an order to surrender. But it can demonstrate that the victim was severely beaten and (like a comparable description in words) evoke emotions that may properly affect the audience’s decision about the permissible use of police evidence. Similarly, an animal rights activist who argues that calves are cruelly confined might reasonably talk about the inhumanely small size of their pens, in which they cannot turn around or even lie down. Others may argue that calves don’t care about turning around or have no right to turn around, but the evocative verbal description of their pens, which makes an emotional appeal, cannot be called fallacious or irrelevant.

In appealing to emotions, then, important strategies are as follows:

You should focus on the facts and offer reasons (essentially, statements linked with “because”), but you may also legitimately bring the facts home to your readers by seeking to provoke appropriate emotions. Your words will be fallacious only if you stimulate emotions that aren’t connected with the facts of the case.