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John McCain told Newsweek: “I never considered myself a maverick.” Jon Stewart's response (starts about 2:40 in) is a great example of heightening — finding the unusual thing and then asking, "If this is true, what else is true?"
Normally this is where we would toss to a montage of John McCain calling himself a maverick but I don’t even fucking need to. That’s how embedded the word maverick is on his persona.
It would be like Rudy Giuliani saying "I never mentioned 9/11. I don’t know what you are talking about."
It's like I Can't Believe It's Not Butter saying, "I never believed I was butter. Why would I have believed that? I never believed it." It's ON THE CONTAINER!
Pretty textbook with the three examples and the last one being a sharp left to absurdity. (Textbook absurdity? Hmm, sounds like a fun class.)
This article also explains heightening and suggest using it as a tool in drawing caricatures.
1 comment:
Interesting, because so many things that work well in comedy would be considered logical fallacies. Ironic, because I think Jon Stewart, a comedian, to be among the most levelheaded people and rational thinkers in news. Especially opinion news.
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