The only problem with a line like that is, unless you’re the editor of “Picturesque Speech and Patter,” it’s kind of hard to apply to your everyday life. There’s something calcifyingly false about standing by the host’s picture window during a thunderstorm, waiting for lightning and its ensuing thunder, then ambling back into the den where the other guests are playing bridge and saying, “Lightning just danced across the sky and thunder ed in the distance.”
But don’t give up. There are literally limitless bundles of wrinkles lying around unclaimed, begging to be picked up and incorporated into people’s everyday speech for the uplift and betterment of all. If Cartier reduced diamonds to ten cents a carat, they wouldn’t have any left. Conversational sparklers are free, and nobody stoops to pick them up.
For centuries man speculated upon the “backside of the moon,’’ that hidden portion of the lunar globe that we could see only by going to the moon and zipping around it. When we finally did see the other side, it turned out to be so much like the side we see all the time that we yawned and forgot the moon ever had a backside we couldn’t see.
We’re right now orbiting around to the “hidden” side of human nature, but unlike the backside of the moon, this one is rich with personal payoff.
Why do so many people, particularly the * * self-improvers, ’ ’ spend so much effort dressing well and staying fit? Easy. We all already know the advantages of dressing well and staying fit. If a magazine were to give us a cover story revealing the heretofore unknown advantages of better dress and good physical appearance, nobody would say, “Hmm. Wow. Is that a fact?” We already know all about it. There are no “heretofore unknown” advantages of dressing well and staying fit. They’re all topside on the table.
Some jewels and other mineral wealth lie right there on the surface or glisten at you in the shallow creek bed. Others you have to dig for. You’ve got to dig to appreciate the payoffs of coloring your speech beyond the great stone cliches and fad flippancies of the moment.
Read the books, letters, articles, debates, and dialogues of a hundred years ago. Yes, the language interests us, but not because it’s merely “old-fashioned.” It’s richer. Just as a country can suffer soil erosion, seacoast erosion, and crop erosion, it can also suffer richness erosion in the language.
A ten-year-old child in Lincoln’s day could talk more engagingly than a “charismatic” candidate today. Why? Values. Before television, everybody had an “act,” a packaged presentation of himself to the world; and in that act, the way a person spoke was key and king. There was an incentive to read more, learn more, broaden horizons, and craft more and more appealing ways to say things. Just because the electronic revolution persuaded the many to shut up and listen to the few does not mean the human ear has lost the ability to be stimulated by ingenious, colorful—or merely different—modes of expression. It’s all still there, waiting to be stroked.
The ear is the forgotten pleasure zone!
We know well the blessings of good sexual arousal, gastronomical arousal, and visual arousal of all kinds. Those arousals are limited. You can’t haul off and enjoy them as much as you please with whomever you please at any and all times that please you. You can, though, please every single ear that comes within range of your speech, and harvest rewards commensurate with those who lead the field at any of those other arousals.
How do I know? My favorite part of being interviewed is when the reporter asks, ‘ * How did you learn to talk like you do?’ ’ It’s fun telling, and therefore recalling, how I learned to “talk like this.” I grew up in North Carolina, where true status in boyhood resided in playing football or owning a convertible. I tried but never made the football team. I was allowed to use Daddy’s hard-top Plymouth during periods of good behavior, but that’s not the same as owning a convertible. The secret of being a happy peasant is to resign yourself early to the fact that you’re never going to be anything more, and concentrate on getting the wine ready for the next festival. I couldn’t do that. I wanted up. I wanted in. I soon learned how.
There was a quiet third way to enter the high school royalty that not many kids took advantage of. If you learned how to “talk”—if you learned how to keep conversations rolling, if you learned how to make the girls giggle without touching them—you might be asked to double-date with a football player. If you were really good at it, you might be asked to double-date with a football player in a convertiblel
Even at low levels of communicability, they recognize the importance of “keeping a conversation going.” Even those who seem to communicate exclusively in grunts and mumbles walk out on relationships because “We never had anything to talk about.”
I made it my business to bristle with interesting things to say.
I’d draw my material from everywhere. A birthday present of Robert Ripley’s gigantic, unexpurgated Believe It or Not from my parents gave me gems like, “The entire population of the planet Earth could fit comfortably inside a half-mile cube.”
Any of the kids who wanted to could have bought that book and engrossed the crowd the same way I did, citing Ripley’s many two-headed calves, women who drove motorcycles in Austria standing on their heads, hundred-year-old men who run and lift weights, and the unfathomably wealthy potentates with titles like the Eppes of Jaipur who refused to eat off anything except plates carved out of a single ruby. None of them ever did. They just sat there and consumed all I could dish out, figuring I had some exclusive pipeline to worlds of’ fascination beyond their reach.
For the more intellectual football players and their dates, I • threw “big” Ripley, conceptual Ripley. Stuff like, “The Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor was it Roman, nor was it an empire” and “The Irish Free State is neither Irish, nor is it free, nor is it a state.”
I forget the historical explanations, and I never played them off history professors, but I always had the feeling I was enriching the party with material of a higher sort than would have been discussed had I not been present. And I kept on getting invited back!
Once I let fly a very funny line, and while enjoying the laughter and guffaws, remembered with alarm that it was from a movie that had played in town only recently. I waited for someone to accuse me of plagiarism, but no one did. They had forgotten. That emboldened me, deliberately this time, to try a few lines from other movies and TV shows that had played even more recently. Nobody laid a glove on me. Some of the very best bons mots from current books and magazines also “worked” in the back seats of convertibles at North Carolina drive-in movies.
I discovered something I still find amazing. If a shtick came fresh out of the popular culture—movies, TV, books, magazines, whatever—I’d always assumed you couldn’t get away with it in a crowd. (By the way, that word shtick, with slight variations in orthography, is German, Russian, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, and Yiddish. For some reason, though, Yiddish gets all the credit!)
On a scale of 1 to 100,1 would have guessed the “usability” of somebody else’s genius was between, say, 1 and 5, depending on the awareness level of your “audience.” It’s actually closer to 90, and getting better all the time as the number of books, magazines, TV channels, etc., proliferate.
Am I flat out recommending you take jokes, lines, quips. squelches, savings, proverbs, put-downs, mottoes/aphorisms, and battle cries you see and hear and use them to make people think you’re brilliant?
You bet I am—but with style, technique, judgment, flexibility, and honesty!
Get that frown off your face. Once upon a time old Secretary of War Henry Stimson, when approached by senior officials with the suggestion that America get into the espionage and intelligence business like everyone else, put that
same frown on his face and said, “Gentlemen don’t read other people’s mail.”
When you go to buy a suit or a dress, you want something that’s you, something that fits you more than in mere physical size. You look for something that expresses you, exemplifies you, bes
peaks you in every way suits and dresses can. You enjoy showing it to friends and hearing them say, “Yes, that’s But what does that mean? You didn’t weave the fabric, cut it any certain way, dream up the accessories, or invent the color blue. Somebody else did, but the resultant come-together nonetheless harmonizes with you. If we were required to present ourselves to others strictly in terms of what we ourselves without collaboration had originated, not many people would be qualified to walk outdoors. Presenting the quintessential you to the world depends not solely on your originality, but on your judgment.
How many people in the world have never had an original clever thought?
And how many who haven’t have ever worried that they haven’t?
The answer to the first part is, almost everybody.
The answer to the second part is, almost nobody.
No harm done. Let those with brilliance to say the things we wish we’d thought of first continue to say them. And let the rest of us learn to harvest those fruits and scatter those seeds, preferably with credit but giving them new reach and new life in any event.
Whatever makes you say, “Gee, I wish I’d said that,” is part of your “wardrobe.” It’s you. Write it down. Buy a little file box and file those shards of lusciousness under appropriate categories for later study and retrieval. The totem pole of ‘ amusement sophistication ranges all the way from pie in the face through naughty double entendres through limitless levels of jokes and stories, funny lines and funny retorts, clear up to puns and wordplay in Latin.
Don’t worry about where you are on that totem pole. Just select the material that has your name on it, regardless of who wrote it. See how far you can stretch your niche and still be comfortable trafficking the material. I’m not at all at home with insult comedy or dirty jokes, no matter how funny. I can, however, uproariously enjoy somebody who is at home with that type of material, provided he stays at least five spiritual yards short of gross.
I find my personal sense of what’s funny so at odds with the taste of those I usually find myself with, that I have to keep my favorite shticks to myself. I know by now, for instance, not to use the one about the sweet little old lady who sat there beaming all during the professor’s lecture about the ancient Persians and Medes who lived many hundreds and thousands of years ago. Afterward she bounded up to the podium, grabbed his hand in both of hers, and said, “Oh, Professor, you’ll never know how much your talk meant to me. You see, my mother was a Meade!”
Notice I say “use”, it, not “tell” it. “Telling” is risky.— Telling a joke, story, etc., is, again, Babe Ruth at bat pointing not just to the outfield fence, but to precisely which part of the outfield fence he intended to send die next pitch over. “Telling” says, “Hey, everybody. I have something I think will make you laugh. Listen now, and judge me. ” Very few shticks in the best-kept library can stand up when the “librarian” is really saying, “I think I’m funny. Let me now put myself on trial.”
The Japanese use beef, not so much as steaks but as seasoning. That’s the way to use shtickleckh (that, believe it or not, is the plural of shtick), not as “jokes” but to illustrate a point. Every speaker is told that jokes make a speech better. What not every speaker learns is to limit his jokes to relevant j
jokes. If a joke illustrates or fortifies a point, it need not be as funny to be effective.
Pretend we’re all at a party and suddenly I say, “Hey, I’ve got a good joke. A schoolteacher in North Carolina went to the mountains to apply for a job. The principal asked him if he believed the earth was round.
“Personally, I believe it is,” replied the teacher, “but I can teach either way.”
Okay, not bad; not bad. But not good enough as a joke.
__- Change it a little. Suppose one of you asks me point-blank how I feel about, for instance, the opposing forces in Country X. And, instead of breaking up the party by answering as bluntly as 1 was asked, suppose I wanted to try to smother that razor blade in Vaseline. Then, suppose I began that effort with that very same story. I will have amused, and defused. I might then succeed in lodging a few thoughtful points regarding Country X, if I have any. Otherwise, I’m still home free.
The world is a cafeteria of wit. And it’s all free. Take what you like. Write it down. Milton Berle, who cultivated the same image as a joke stealer that Dean Martin did as a drunk and Liberace as a homosexual, once said a rival comic made him’ laugh so hard it almost made him drop his pencil! It’s a good idea to make a mental note only at the moment of thought theft, and do your jotting later in privacy.
At day’s beginning, or end, You look over your catch, like a Long Island bass fisherman might look over his. You don’t have to plan routines or plot specific usage of your captured treasure. Just looking it over and making the mental commitment to try to flavor your verbal traffic will reinforce your inventory of good stuff. Your stimulated mind will cooperate by making connections, bring the right line up at the right time.
You can devise ways to adapt material to your own usage. Once I reached out and stole a line from somebody’s description of some complicated act of juggling and gymnastics in a circus. The writer said it was “like doing an appendectomy on a man carrying a piano upstairs.”
What an image! An appendectomy. On a man, while he’s’ busy carrying a piano upstairs. Sorry—that’s just too good to be allowed to lie there on a printed page describing a maneuver in a circus. There are too many other ways that can be used.
In self-defense, for instance. A friend calls and wants to do . something together. You’d rather have emphysema. A traditional “Sorry, I’m busy” sounds lame. If you stay cheerful, ’ however, and say, “You ought to take a look at my schedule right now. It’s like doing an appendectomy on a man carrying a piano upstairs,” then you’re excused!
Nothing has changed. You barreled your way out of an unwanted commitment on sheer energy and color.
When you hear or read a truly good line, let’s say, about a celebrity who lived in the 1920’s who drank too much, don’t say to yourself, “Gee, I’m really going to slay them if his name ever comes up again.”
Uproot it and replant it. If it worked with the forgotten celebrity, it might work with a current one. Or your boss. Or your Uncle Jake. Or a local politician. Or the anonymous drunk astride the bar. Or yourself!
If it’s good, no matter where it comes from, write it down and let it marinate in your collection. The mere fact that you think it’s good means it’s for your wardrobe. The only task left is to adapt it, hold it for the right moment, and resist the temptation to let it loose before the right moment. Then you’re not being witty; you’re trying to be funny. And that, Mark Twain told us, is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug!
Attribution is a moral requirement only when a line is so undeniably good you’d be ashamed of leaving the room having people think you were trying to pass it off as yours. I’d never use that “lightning-lightning bug” without crediting Mark Twain. (If he heard it from a river boatman near Hannibal and failed to give him credit, that’s a matter for Mark Twain’s conscience!) Woody Allen gave the world a splash of color I find useful in pacifying businesspeople who’ve been roughed up by unskilled members of my staff.
When I learn that an innocent caller was abused by one of my employees, I get him on the phone personally and apologize by saying, “Hey, pal, this is what Woody Allen always warned us against when he said, ‘What if Khrushchev wanted peace and his interpreter wanted war?’ ”
My conscience wouldn’t let me rest if I didn’t give Woody Allen credit for that one. The ethic and etiquette of stealing bons mots are obvious. Wfa»n foe lines are outstanding, always accord credit to the one you stole it from/the official attribute. That’s not only morally correct, it’s a lot safer. There’s always a chance that somebody in your audience will know the line and the source and expose you. Give credit where due, and you emerge as a sophisticate of good judgment. Otherwise, you’re a co
mmon thief.
Too many people regard being colorful or dull as immutable conditions. “This one’s tall, that one’s blond, this one’s Presbyterian, that one’s colorful.” It rarely occurs to dull people (a) that they’re dull and (b) that they can do something about it.
You can. You can get colorful material the same places the comics get colorful material. Everybody who jogs isn’t out to win the marathon. Everybody who goes to a gym for a workout isn’t competing for Mr. America. Everybody who takes up French isn’t angling for a job as simultaneous interpreter at the United Nations. And everybody who tries to brighten his speech isn’t out to regale the night club crowd at Vegas with ninety minutes of standup dynamite.
Merely holding up your end of the table-better than you do now is Mission Accomplished. s
So go buy some joke books—new, old, used, paperback, dog-eared, about doctors, sex, drinking, business, race, religion—buy everything that calls itself a joke book, whether or not they’re even funny in your view. Read them through. That exercise will unlimber punch line instincts you allowed to calcify way back when you first decided you weren’t going to be a “comic.”
Buy old magazines, and be sure to study the cartoon captions. Look at TV comedies with a fresh eye, trying to identify and isolate what the writers and producers thought would please crowds of viewers. Note clinically what the highly paid professionals think wins the plaudits. Most of it will roll off. It’s not yours. There’s a nice little warm feeling inside when something comes along that you do appreciate. That’s yours. It sticks to you. But it won’t for long unless you write it down. Write it. Study it. Review it. Adopt it. Adapt it. And then go try it. Be careful to curb it when you start growing a sense of timing and delivery and you start getting too many good results. Don’t ever let it get to the “Hey, look at me!” stage.
Make People Talk. Colorful talkers are more fun to talk to than those whose words all come out in black-and-white.
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