"Many times what cannot be refuted by arguments can be parried by laughter.” - Desiderius Erasmus

 "Many times what cannot be refuted by arguments can be parried by laughter.” - Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536). The Praise of Folly, 25, 1509, tr. Hoyt Hopewell Hudson, 1941

 I understand this quote in a negative and a positive sense. In the negative sense, one way to respond to a well-reasoned, cogent, clear, and correct viewpoint is to dismiss it as absurd. “There is no way that anybody actually does that, it is impossible that that would happen, it is foolish to think that those words or that action meant what you thought it did”, and so on and so on, are the cries of the deceiver, the hypocrite, and the fool. This doesn't mean that each and every statement of this sort, each and every counter-argument is invalid, but it does suggest that if your opponent in an argument, or someone who holds an opposite point of view than you, is deciding to try and achieve victory or perceived correctness by dismissing your concerns, or treating your ideas as worthless, then they may be trying to beat your argument by laughter, and not by reason. Thus, they may believe that they are correct, or they may convince others they are correct, without actually having offered evidence in opposition to you. It is important to be able to see when this is the case, and when it is not. We have all met conspiracy theorists who believe lizard aliens control the art or some such thing, and we often laugh oat them and dismiss them. Thus, they may take our disagreement with them, our belief that lizard aliens are not secretly controlling the planet, as us trying to win against their argument by laughter, instead of reasoned decision, when that is not the case. The same can hold true for any statement or belief, for everything from opinions on capitalism, law, or religion. Disagreement does not mean dismissal of human worth…. Except when it does. 

In a positive sense, laughter is one way in which we can face up to impossible or stressful situations. If you need to make an impossible choice, or are stuck in a bad situation with no way out, then laughter is one response that can assist us in those dark times. Are you in pain, did someone die, are you losing your court battle, did you get arrested for something you didn't do, are all your financial investments going bad, or did you miss your connecting flight? We know that what we should best do in these situations is sit down quietly and have a good think, but we find that what we most often actually do in these situations is panic, cry, rage, or laugh. Of all these options, these actions arising from overwhelming emotions, laughter is perhaps the safest and most effective response. Once you laugh at something dark and scary, then it becomes not quite so terrible. If you have no effective response at all, then laughter will at least leave you functioning. It's not a refutation of the situation or the choice, but rather a sort of acceptance., a way to abstract the moment away from us, and to respond in an intelligible manner. If we can't fix something, then we may at least laugh at it.

So we see that laughter can be used for good or bad. Laughter is a response to the absurd, Ot the conundrum to the impossible. Thus, when we use it to defeat an argument, we are saying that the argument is funny, absurd, or impossible. We can laugh at someone who says the world is ending, or we can laugh at a person who says that the world is not ending - in each case we say something about their viewpoints, that they should not be taken seriously. If we follow the logic of an argument, then oftentimes it seems that we become drawn into a sort of black-mirror-esque world, one where this crazy conclusion makes sense, if you just agree with the original, seemingly innocuous, premises. Everything seems obvious, and it is only when we step away from the debate that we are able to see how stupid the whole etching really was. Or - how stupid we think it is now, at least. So,  I think that this quote gives us two pieces of advice. The first is to try and refute your arguments by laughing, so that in that way you can realize some of the possible weak points, some of the possible lines of attack. The second is to watch out for attempts to dismiss a line of argument with laughter, because that may mean that the person on one end of the argument has no other, reasonable and logical, way to respond. Has the disagreement moved into the realm of the absurd, or been brought there? 

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