How to Win Every Argument: The Use and Abuse of Logic (2006)

Lapident, argumentum ad 101

That sounds more like Guinesses talking than Genesis.

(The volunteer was invariably discomfited by the gale of laughter.)

Those who set out upon the trail of public debate should carry
a knapsack full of custom-built jokes ready to toss before an
audience in times of need. At the very least, the wave of mirth
washing over your victim slightly lowers his authority, even while
it gives you time to think.
The ability to produce irrelevant humour on the spur of the
moment is a product of wit and experience. Many years spent in
the debating chamber of a university will sharpen your ability to
think on your feet. The joke need not even be a clever one if
delivered with style. I once saw a speaker making a perfectly valid
point about sales to authoritarian states of airplanes which could
carry nuclear weapons. He was floored by an interjection which
suggested that wheelbarrows could do the same.
An undergraduate in the process of being censured for high
crimes and misdemeanours took all of the force out of the attack
by facing his audience solemnly and saying:

/ wish to accept censure, and to couple with it the name of my mother,

who also thinks I've been a very naughty boy.

(Collapse, amid uproar, of prosecution case.)

Lapidem, argumentum ad

Bishop Berkeley expressed the view that matter does not exist
separately from the perception of it. When Boswell told Dr
Johnson that this was an idea impossible to refute, the good
doctor's response was to kick against a stone so that his foot
rebounded. 'I refute it thus', he said. He was not so much
refuting it as ignoring it, because the evidence for the existence