Why a classical education can be so amusing

I now proceed to plagiarize my own comment from over at Alexandra's site, just because I amused myself with it. Fair warning to people who (unlike myself) can't read anything without imagining it in vivid detail: those of you with tender sensibilities might not wish to proceed.

At any rate, my sense of humor is dominated heavily by irony, and so it is unsurprising that my favorite of all rhetorical tricks is something called paralipsis. (Yes, there are dozens of rhetorical tricks and they all have Latin or Greek names. Don't you wish you had been a classics major?) Paralipsis is when you make sure somebody knows about something by declaring that you're not going to talk about it:

"I will not stoop to reminding you of the fact that my honourable opponent's father was an alcoholic Republican and his mother a bisexual prostitute, nor that he was once discovered in flagrante delicto with a Volkswagen Beetle painted to resemble the Disney character Herbie. These unfortunately undeniable facts are quite irrelevant to the question before this House today and I urge you to put them entirely out of your mind."

Look, I warned you visual people...but in my defense the examples of paralipsis I could have drawn from the Greek orators would have been considerably more scatological, classical Greek politics being the fertile, no-holds-barred field from which sprang the rowdily bawdy humor of Aristophanes. Don't you wish you had been a classics major?