Strawman Has a Point/Theatre

Examples of in  include:


 * A staple of the comedies of Aristophanes:
 * Is a contest or debate between representatives of traditional ideals and new ways of thought, with the new ones exposed as dangerous, and the traditional side proving decisively victorious. (Sound familiar?) Unfortunately for the playwright's point, most of these debates consist of the supposedly sophistic side making a good argument which the traditional side dismisses out of hand as blasphemy, without making any intelligent counterarguments. Then people follow the wrong argument because it makes more sense (it's even lampshaded in Clouds) and bad things happen to them as a result.
 * That makes it sound like Aristophanes may have been parodying both sides, telling the people who he otherwise agreed with that "you can't just say 'that's blasphemy' because it doesn't address their appeal to the masses and rings hollow; you have to actually explain why they're wrong". It's like a religious person making fun of both Richard Dawkins and Jack Chick. The bad things that strike the followers of the new ways are Aristophanes' attempt to do just that.
 * Moliere's Don Juan:
 * In what might be an Invoked Trope example of this, the play is ostensibly condemning its evil atheist Villain Protagonist and most of the other characters remark on how horrible a person Juan is, including his servant, Sganarelle. The thing is, Sganarelle is certainly no saint himself besides being too much of a coward to stop Juan, is happy to profit from Juan's evil actions. Thus, both contemporary audiences and modern ones tend to think that instead of validating the views of Moral Guardians, Sganarelle instead serves to make Don Juan's philosophy actually come across as better, and some of Moliere's contemporaries considered the play "diabolical" for this reason.
 * Quite a few plays from that time period revolve around what is essentially their version of Shock Rock—a Magnificent Bastard has a wonderful time doing all those things the Church says are so awful, and then at the end he gets dragged into Hell to appease the Moral Guardians with what is effectively an And That's Terrible ending.
 * In Legally Blonde: Callahan points out that Enrique being flamboyant, effeminate, and knowing a lot about shoes does not automatically imply he is gay. He even sings a song about it -- "Gay, or European?" in order to illustrate the difference. Callahan ends up sexually harassing Elle and thus being one of the bad guys. And Enrique did turn out to be gay. But Callahan is right that effeminate does not automatically equal gay.
 * In Porgy and Bess, "It Ain't Necessarily So," which argues that sin is a nonissue since most of the Bible is probably false, is the primary Villain Song of a cocaine dealer and bootlegger who tries to trick the male lead into incriminating himself for (justifiable) murder, forcefeeds cocaine to the formerly addicted female lead, and blackmails her into moving up the coast with him. In the coming decades, it was taken up by numerous jazz and rock singers without a hint of irony.


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