Rhetoric feels comic to me because I perceive this heavy fixation on human language as a kind of confinement.

 Rhetoric feels comic to me because I perceive this heavy fixation on human language as a kind of confinement. Those people who claim to say “very deep and beautiful things” with their polished words and inflections would probably seem quite ridiculous to an alien who doesn’t know the language, because all they’d hear is mumbling. That’s exactly how “speech experts” seem to me.