Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill [53]
[11] Looking at the language of jokes, especially ones that involve a butt, we see that the butt gets “sent up” or “knocked down a peg”. Up or down, there is social movement implicit in the work of a joke. According to Freud, a joke is serious and subversive—read another way, it works to elevate the teller and denigrate the butt.
[12] So I pose a question: why are we constantly denigrating dentists? It might be because they cause us pain, but more likely, it’s because they have a bizarre and special permission to probe one of our most personal anatomic spaces. We let dentists put needles, crowns and dentures, not to mention their hands, into a space that serves the dual function of nourishing our bodies and expressing our social status.
[13] More than just a highly sensitive observer, though, the dentist takes ownership of another person’s mouth. By extension, he or she has control over the oral functions that make the mouth such an important orifice: the ability to eat, the ability to communicate and to express, and, perhaps most important for our argument here, the dentist has control over the esthetics of the mouth, which dictate so much of how we understand each other, and how we understand ourselves. Imposing on the oral cavity in such a way gives the dentist a transgressive power over our mouths, and a strange ownership of a very intimate space. No wonder dentists make us anxious.
[14] [qualifies claim:] But there are doctors who do the same thing—cardiac surgeons, for example, invade and transgress, and probably most people would be more than a little anxious about having open-heart surgery. It would not, however, be a joking matter—a heart is among the few organs that are crucial for the very basis of life. Teeth on the other hand – well, who wants to admit that teeth are important? Certainly not as important as a heart, right?
[15] So we are anxious about the dentist smelling our breath or discovering bits of food stuck between our teeth, about having a smile that indicates social order, and, to further complicate matters, we are anxious about admitting all this. [= ultimate claim] Because teeth shouldn’t be that important.
[16] Out of this anxiety, dentist jokes are born. Comedy is often a vehicle for truth: dentist jokes indicate that our fear of the dentist—physical discomfort or pain, the power the dentist holds over an important part of our body—is real. And jokes are a way to ease that fear, to make dentistry accessible and, occasionally, even funny.
[17] So today, on our inaugural day as dentists, let’s embrace the dentist joke! Teeth are important, and we like them! We’re going out into the world to change smiles and lives. And we’re going to make jokes when opportunities arise—not because what we do isn’t serious, but because we can’t and shouldn’t take ourselves too seriously.
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Try This 3.4: Apply the Five Analytical Moves to a Speech
Speeches provide rich examples for analysis, and they are easily accessible on the Internet and on You Tube. We especially recommend a site called American Rhetoric (You can Google it for the URL). Choose any speech and analyze it for its use of the five analytical moves. Where, for example, does the speech locate pattern? How does it define significant parts and locate them in relation to the whole? Where does the speaker make inferences? To what extent does it reformulate its questions and explanations?
On the basis of your results, draw a few conclusions about the speech’s point of view and its way of presenting that point of view, which is to say its rhetoric. Try to get beyond the obvious and the general. What does applying the moves cause you to notice that you might not have noticed before?