Word: humorous
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...Transcript's editorial reprinted in the CRIMSON of a day or two age presented an interesting speculation regarding the use of humor and of humorous questions in debating. Competitive speaking between colleges happens at present to find itself in a state of metamorphosis of which some aspects are necessarily unlovely and extreme; and it can profit definitely by examining the frank criticism of those who sit in debating audiences or who serve as its official judges...
...judges, with their eyes open for logical consistency, voted one way, and the audience, delighted by a steady flow of capable wit, voted the other. The confusion arose, I believe, from the simple fact of distribution. What the new school of debating wishes to do is not to place humor and logic across the stage from each other, as occurred Saturday night, but to combine the two. When this has been accomplished successfully, there will be no need for the special instructions to judges which the Transcript appears to consider necessary...
More than that: the final value of the new tendency cannot be estimated from debates of this sort so accurately as from argument over the usual type of question. If debate on propositions of a serious nature derives new yigor from these experiments with humor, and questions of importance can come to be presented in a more keen and pleasing manner, the art will have been greatly refined. Many steps forward have been taken within the last few years by recognizing the important role of wit in debating. Therein lies the true worth of this less solemn tendency. Dwight...
...ringside of many an arduous intercollegiate debate in the past. And the attentive observer had many free and fair chances to laugh. Unfortunately, however, he had also much occasion to groan. For one thing the speakers for Yale established so complete a monopoly upon the humor of the evening that the Department of Justice might well bring suit against them for a combination in restraint of trade. Surely it is a plausible theory that the editors of the Lampoon had been bribed by Yale not to suggest, in preparation for the debate a single risible notion of which the Harvard...
...used its wit to no effectively organized end whatsoever. Time and again the debaters from New Haven suggested elements of a possible case, but time and again they failed to catch these up into the weft and warp of any sequential argument. It was plain that they sought only humor. Harvard, on the other hand, did present a case. Now, this discrepancy need not necessarily have been difficult to resolve. Had the governing council of the Harvard-Princeton-Yale triangle frankly declared not alone that it courted humor, but also that humor, or its absence, was to be the chief...