It's all about the enthymemes

When he wrote about rhetoric in ancient Greece, Aristotle noted that the most powerful forms of rhetorical reasoning took the form of what he called enthymemes (en-tha-MEEMs). An enthymeme is a syllogism in which one of the premises is suppressed and intuited by the audience.

For instance, while a traditional syllogism goes something like this:

Premise 1: Socrates is a human.
Premise 2: All humans die.
Conclusion: Socrates will die.

An enthymeme goes like this:

Premise: Socrates is a human.
Conclusion: Socrates will die.

The enthymeme is powerful because it incorporates the audience and their beliefs into the argument. In supplying the premise from their own understandings of what they believe or know to be true, the audience validates the argument as being "obvious." In recognizing this aspect of discourse, Aristotle was trying to account for how so many arguments seem "rational" and mysterious at the same time.

Aristotle's observations extend to other areas of discourse. Humor, for instance, is deeply enthymematic. Puns are funny because they depend on our previous knowledge of what the misused word should be. Observational humor is funny because quips about human experience depend on our common understanding of human existence. And so on.

But just as enythmemes explain why we should find something funny, they also show why we don't find something funny—or why something that is funny to someone can be offensive to another. Enthymemes work because, by definition, they presuppose a level of agreement between the speaker and the audience. If we don't share the language, we miss the puns. If we come from different social backgrounds or cultural expectations, we miss the joke. In controversial issues—particularly issues of race, sex, religion, and politics—the background of shared opinions and beliefs that humorous enthymemes assume is uncertain, and so would-be comedians need to take care in framing their jokes. That's the challenge and risk of being funny, and why high-profile comedians make the big bucks.

Which brings up the curious case of this week's cover of The New Yorker, which attempts to poke fun at the myths surrounding Barack Obama and his wife:



The cover created a firestorm of controversy, including denunciations by both candidates and a petition drive condemning the cover. In today's New York Times, Maureen Dowd thinks that this firestorm means that Obama can't take a joke, but something bigger than Obama's purported humorlessness may be in play.

Simply put, the folks at The New Yorker forgot to take enthymemes into account. They obviously don’t take those myths seriously—and I wouldn’t expect them to—but their New York parochialism perhaps led them to assume that no one takes those myths seriously. The "humor” of the cover depends on that assumption.

But the editors guessed wrong. The reaction from both the Obama and McCain camps suggests that those myths are far more serious and the assumptions that the white American public has about Obama are far more unsettled than the art editors at The New Yorker think. Indeed, Obama's race remains an issue for many white Americans, who are still confused as to whether or not Obama is a Christian or is or is not the anti-Christ. Rhetorically, that is the issue with the cover. As Aristotle would have reminded The New Yorker, it's all about the enthymemes.