After carefully analyzing an episode of NBC´s How I Met Your Mother, I noticed that there is much more to it than just plain laughter. It is filled with many figures that are mentioned in Heinrichs´ book. It is these play on words and techniques which are the root to the show´s hilariousness. According to Heinrichs, rhetoric figures of speech help you become more adept at word play, they make you sound clever and can also help persuade.
Once Daphne (the big women trying to sleep beside Marshall) has had enough of Marshall and his excessive talking, she asks the steward to move her to another seat. Unfortunately the flight is fully booked, so she says: "Hell I´ve been going to pilates, I can just hold on to the landing gear like this".."Well I´ve only signed up for pilates, I actually haven´t started going yet".."I haven´t signed up". This technique is called to edit yourself aloud, it consists of interrupting yourself to correct yourself. According to Heinrichs this makes your audience believe you have a passion for fairness and accuracy. These are just a few examples of rhetorical figures used in the show.
The first figure that I witnessed in the show was a cliché twist. This is when you take your opponents cliché and give the expression a twist by sticking a surprise ending to it. An example of this in the episode is when Marshall is blabbering non-stop about how his and Lilly´s (his wife) dreams were being destroyed (this idea is a cliché). So the women beside him who his annoyed and trying to get some sleep makes the cliché literal and says: "You are destroying a lot of dreams right now". This is a clever way to persuade Marshall to shut up and let her rest.
Next, Ted Mosby makes a rhetorical fallacy in his attempt to convince Lilly that using driving gloves is important. He claims that "in 99.9% of highway accidents, the driver was not wearing gloves". This logic is just absurd and when Lilly catches onto it she says its stupid. Ted then retorts with a pun in another attempt to persuade "Then why is it called the glove compartment?".
Once Daphne (the big women trying to sleep beside Marshall) has had enough of Marshall and his excessive talking, she asks the steward to move her to another seat. Unfortunately the flight is fully booked, so she says: "Hell I´ve been going to pilates, I can just hold on to the landing gear like this".."Well I´ve only signed up for pilates, I actually haven´t started going yet".."I haven´t signed up". This technique is called to edit yourself aloud, it consists of interrupting yourself to correct yourself. According to Heinrichs this makes your audience believe you have a passion for fairness and accuracy. These are just a few examples of rhetorical figures used in the show. 
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