It probably wouldn’t surprise anyone who knows me to learn that I was in my High School’s debate team. We were good too. I grew up in a tiny country town and we competed at State level in NSW. I loved it.

Here’s how it usually went. We’d turn up and only find out what the debate topic is 45 minutes beforehand. Even then, it would be another 15 minutes before we were told which side we’d be arguing for.

That’s right – we had to be prepared to argue either side of the topic right up until the last minute. We had to understand and appreciate the integrity and force of everyone’s reasoning. And we had to know how every argument could be fought against, too.

This is a pretty good skill. Actually, I think it’s a practice that should be mandatory for everyone who wants to live in a society. Everyone isn’t right, but we do need to understand each other. And we all need to do an internal audit of our opinions.

Do we really think what we think we think? And are our opinions actually any good? If our opinions aren’t strong enough to withstand basic challenges, we need better opinions.

I can read your thoughts. Yes, this actually does have something to do with comedy. Comedians make arguments. We really do.

I wish I could remember the comedian who said it, but one of them recently said in an interview that comedian’s jokes are all a rebuttal against the stuff that confronts us. If something pisses us off, gets between us and what we want, frustrates us, challenges us, or just strikes us as stupid, it’s the birth of a joke.

Comedians are always arguing back. That’s where our material comes from. It makes sense, then, that one way to become a better comedian is to become better at creating arguments.

Again, I can hear you thinking. You’re skeptical about this theory. If it helps I can tell you that Doug Stanhope, an undeniably gifted comedian, said in an interview I saw this month that he approaches comedy like a defense attorney.

That’s his model and it’s how he works. He looks for something that really needs defending, a moral or social underdog, and he gets to crafting arguments in support of something we might all consider wrong or abhorrent. And he uses every absurd rhetorical trick in the book to get us to think differently about it. That’s how he writes jokes – something he’s been doing very well for decades now.

So here’s my point…. Comedians can get better by becoming better at arguing and negotiating. And they can find material by looking either at what they want to argue for or against. It strikes me that this paradigm is a relatively easy way to write and to improve.

And here’s the fantastic news… when we fight, we can fight dirty. That’s totally allowed. In serious debates, there’s these things called Rhetorical Fallacies. They’re basically bullshit arguments. Sometimes they’re used as a sneaky trick to fight dirty, and sometimes it’s just wrong-headed sloppy thinking.

You might know some of these, like Ad Hominem which is attacking the person instead of their argument. Or Post hoc ergo propter hoc which is assuming that the thing that came first caused the thing that came after it. Other famous ones include the Straw Man argument (arguing with an issue you invented instead of the one that’s on the table), or Circular Arguments (where you conflate the claim with the proof, like saying that the Bible is the truth because it says so in the Bible) There’s a whole range of them and you can see them beautifully categorized and explained over here,

Now, if you pull any of this shit in a real debate, you’ll be eviscerated. The other team will call you on your bullshit, or the judge will. In any formal argument setting if you try to sneak fallacies and dirty tricks past anyone. you’ll be eaten alive But comedy? Absolufuckinglitely! Defend the indefensible with an absurd argument or illogical reasoning and we have the potential for a hilarious bit!

In fact, it might be another way to write jokes. You could take a fallacy like an Undistributed Middle (Assuming because two things share a property, that makes them the same thing) and argue that working in a call center is a lot like scuba diving because of the critical emphasis on communication and requirement to learn specialized equipment, and then point out that there might be fewer sharks in the ocean than in the workplace.

I could use Unfalsifiability and say that you can’t prove I’m not Batman. I could assume there’s only one explanation for an observation (Affirming the Consequent) and say the only reason for birth is to ensure more people experience death.

Because here’s the thing – we’re not (visibly, at least) trying to change anyone’s thoughts or behaviour. Our sole (acknowledged) agenda is to entertain and amuse, even if it’s be playfully challenging the status quo.

Because we’re not sincerely trying to convert anyone, it’s perfectly OK – expected, even – to engage in some ridiculous rhetorical fallacies. We can be intentionally absurd. We can claim that ghosts are the only explanation for the noise in the water pipes. We can say that Donald Trump’s diet means we should all start gorging on McDonalds meals, as he does, if we want to get rich.

It’s OK to based a joke on a False Premise (as long as it’s something we can go along with. If your whole joke is based on the assumption that all married women have wooden legs, our brains will say “no, they don’t'” and that will undermine the punchline). We can exaggerate: Hyperbole is actually one of the major joke structures.

The list of Logical Fallacies is basically 54 ways to make and advance absurd arguments, and it could make writing bits a lot easier.

Now, with the comedy stuff out of the way I’d just like to put shit on Socrates for a little bit. Because he’s not here to defend himself and also because fuck that guy.

See, Socrates (or Plato – it’s hard to tell which of them really said stuff) hated rhetorical fallacies. Hated them. He spent his whole life fighting them.

His arch enemies were the Sophists. They were a school that taught people to win arguments by any means necessary. Mostly they taught people to perform persuasive diatribes and they encouraged all the bullshit thinking, dirty tricks and outright lies. They charged big money for this training because graduates could get great jobs in politics.

Socrates spoke out against Sophistry, as it was called, and arguably his death was because he opposed it. He also wanted to run the poets out of town because he thought poetry is persuasion through lies, using metaphors and analogies to advance arguments instead of real evidence. He claimed to reject all persuasion and only care about what’s real and true.

But did he, though?

In The Republic he uses a couple of stories to make his points. Fictional stories. That’s right…. he manufactures fake evidence to argue his point.

First he gives us The Ring of Gyges (you’ll know it as Lord of the Rings) and tells us how the invisibility ring corrupts us and makes us do bad things, so it has to be destroyed in a volcano.

Next he tells us The Allegory of the Cave (the movie version is called The Matrix), in which one of the people stuck in the dungeon looking at silhouettes takes the red pill and escapes, seeing the real world outside for the first time… you get the picture.

Two completely fake-ass stories made to argue dubious truth-claims – that people are inherently corrupt and only behave when they’re observes, and that the world we experience isn’t the real one. People quote these stories, like Socrates did, as though they prove the claim.

I might be 2,400 years too late, but I’m calling bullshit. Socrates: you of all people should know you don’t make a truth-claim with made-up evidence. You should know that even if you pull that deceptive crap it proves nothing. Telling us “there could be a higher plane of existence” doesn’t equal “there is one.”

What I’m saying is that your personal brand of sophistry is beneath a serious philosopher, but it’s OK for comedians. You might want to give some thought to giving up this whole philosophy thing and trying your hand at comedy instead?