“The fool speaks. The wise man listens”: irony and proverbs in favor of persuasion

Abstract

In its genesis, Rhetoric was used as an analytical tool for the study of the persuasive-argumentative specificities of public discourses (especially in the political and judicial spheres). Facing the evolution of communication media, it has expanded its limits of analysis to discourses that go beyond verbal expression. In this article, we seek to demonstrate how this area of ??knowledge can be used to investigate a discourse originated from a common practice of our days: the posting and consumption of videos on sharing sites. In this paper, a YouTube video is analyzed in order to illustrate how a speaker can persuade his audience through humor. Methodologically speaking, a qualitative analysis, based on rhetorical, paremiological and linguistic-discursive assumptions, is used. The rhetorical-discursive strategies used by the speaker, notably the irony rhetoric figure and the unraveling of proverbial statements, will be examined, and the rhetorical-argumentative scope of such strategies will be considered.