The chapter opens by sorting hearers into three grades and describing what each does. The best sort practises the way diligently. The middling sort half keeps it and half loses it. The poorest sort laughs out loud.
Then the line that makes the passage famous: if he did not laugh, it would not be fit to be the way.
That is a remarkable thing for a teaching to say about itself. It converts the worst available reception into a criterion, and it does so without contempt for the person laughing, whose reaction is treated as accurate given what he can see. The argument is that a way anybody could immediately recognise as sound would be operating within the standards people already hold, and the whole book is about a way that inverts them.
The move is a risky one and the book uses it sparingly. Chapter seventy says nobody in the world is able to understand these words, and adds that this is why the sage wears coarse cloth with jade inside it. Chapter thirty-five admits that the teaching put into words is bland. Chapter seventy-eight ends by saying that straight words seem to say the opposite.
Taken together those passages amount to a standing account of why the text is not persuasive, offered by the text. It is not a claim to esoteric status and there is no suggestion of a hidden doctrine reserved for initiates. What is being said is simpler and harder: the content is available, it is stated plainly, and its plain statement will read as absurd to most people who encounter it.