Fallacy

32 Humor and Ridicule: "lost in the laugh"
Continuous humor sometimes is diversionary. Sarcasm, parody, mimicry -- all the various forms of ridicule -- are impertinent intrusions in argument. Yet heaven help the man incapable of laughing where the occasion warrants. As audience members we will wish to enjoy any good sallies -- and then to scrutinize the argument.
EXAMPLE COMMENT
"My opponent's position reminds me of a story . . ." Let us hope the story is a good one. If so, we will be entertained and then we may return to reason. If the story is irrelevant, then it is an impudent diversion, and if the story has a point which allegedly applies to the issue, then we will have to consider whether it does in fact apply.
In a college debate on public development of power, one speaker got a ludicrous effect by talking about the "dam sites." It would be crude punditing to punish a punster. But continuous humor is sometimes an ally against thinking.
Clemenceau is said to have once remarked, "Fourteen points, fourteen points! Why the Lord Almighty had only ten!" The quip deserves a laugh, but it is not an innocent intrusion on the discussion. It seeks, by belittling Wilson's program, to put the audience into an unreceptive mood.
In the course of a parliamentary debate the young Disraeli was once heckled with cries of "Jew! Jew!" He responded: "My people were kings and princes, when yours were galley slaves." NO COMMENT,
When Darwin's Origin of Species set the world to debating the theory of evolution, Bishop Wilberforce and Thomas Huxley appeared together in a public discussion of the topic. The bishop made a skillful speech without seriously examining the scientific evidence. "Then, turning to his antagonist with a smiling insolence, he begged to know, was it through his grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed his descent from a monkey?" Huxley is reported to have arisen slowly and deliberately. "I asserted, and I repeat, that a man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling, it would be a man, a man of restless and versatile intellect, who, not content with an equivocal (sic) success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent digressions, and skilled appeals to religious prejudice."

[The description of Wilberforce's conduct is taken from "A Grandmother's Tales," Macmillan's Magazine, vol. 78, p. 433; Huxley's retort is quoted from Woodbridge Riley, From Myth to Reason, p. 316. Very likely none of the several versions of this celebrated incident are wholly accurate.]

EXAMPLE	COMMENT
"My opponent's position reminds me of a story . . ."	Let us hope the story is a good one. If so, we will be entertained and then we may return to reason. If the story is irrelevant, then it is an impudent diversion, and if the story has a point which allegedly applies to the issue, then we will have to consider whether it does in fact apply.
In a college debate on public development of power, one speaker got a ludicrous effect by talking about the "dam sites."	It would be crude punditing to punish a punster. But continuous humor is sometimes an ally against thinking.
Clemenceau is said to have once remarked, "Fourteen points, fourteen points! Why the Lord Almighty had only ten!"	The quip deserves a laugh, but it is not an innocent intrusion on the discussion. It seeks, by belittling Wilson's program, to put the audience into an unreceptive mood.
In the course of a parliamentary debate the young Disraeli was once heckled with cries of "Jew! Jew!" He responded: "My people were kings and princes, when yours were galley slaves."	NO COMMENT,
When Darwin's Origin of Species set the world to debating the theory of evolution, Bishop Wilberforce and Thomas Huxley appeared together in a public discussion of the topic. The bishop made a skillful speech without seriously examining the scientific evidence. "Then, turning to his antagonist with a smiling insolence, he begged to know, was it through his grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed his descent from a monkey?"	Huxley is reported to have arisen slowly and deliberately. "I asserted, and I repeat, that a man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling, it would be a man, a man of restless and versatile intellect, who, not content with an equivocal (sic) success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent digressions, and skilled appeals to religious prejudice."