The Rhetoric Part

It's been a long time since we've focused on rhetoric in this class. We hear a lot about humor, what's funny, what isn't and so on. Sometimes we talk about what works to make someone's point and what does and that is rhetoric talk. We don't say it though, the word rhetoric. The two words to some people might seem very different in terms of content and purpose at first glance. Rhetoric is very serious. Humor is light. Humor is "just for laughs" and Rhetoric is for a distinct purpose. These ideas however are just stereotypes, not fully shaped. The two, Rhetoric and Humor, fit quite well together. It seems that it is more and more important for even the speakers on the most serious topics to lighten the mood with some humor. How many of you think it would be inappropriate for a speaker on cancer or heart attacks to crack a joke before he talked about his prize winning research? Probably no one, although I remember when I was very young that my grandma used to talk about this: "When did it become o.k. for people to joke at things like this?" was what she was saying; she was a cancer survivor herself and thought it was profane, now though she's loosened a bit up, adjusted to the times.
So when did humor and rhetoric start fitting together so well? Probably always to some extent. I mean we've read A Modest Proposal, a work which was written a couple hundred years ago; this is a perfect example of humor and rhetoric. We talked extensively about if this worked however. Did his backwards argument really convince us or if it did that, was it enough to convince us to do something about it? I guess the one thing that I mentioned above about speeches needing humor is quite different from this. The humor is just a sidebar. It serves a different purpose. It's entertainment in the midst of serious stuff; it's not integral material to the speech itself. It is not to convince. I think these differences are also the differences between today and then. We still have Modest Proposal-esque arguments, but the sidebar stuff is sort of new. I'm sure that in earlier years when people gave speeches, it was straight up; it was serious throughout.