Making People Talk

by Barry M Farber

  He seemed fine to me in all key respects—appearance, manner, intelligence, and achievement in his field, insurance. He seemed so fine I was about to buy a policy from him, until I asked him if he’d mind explaining a few details to me, and he said yes, he’d be happy as a lark.

  I know it’s fussy to the brink of unbearability—or beyond—but I can’t buy insurance, or anything else, from anybody capable of straight-facedly saying he’s happy as a lark! I’m a lover of brisk, rich communication, and I’m a conscientious objector; against dealing with anybody who can let a cliche that colossal slip through his lips without immediately throwing himself on die floor, pleading temporary insanity, begging my forgiveness, and swearing never to do such a thing again!

  If he tells me he’s happy as a lark, he’s got everything it takes to tell the next person he’s fit as a fiddle, high as a kite, sick as a dog, crazy as a loon, tight as a drum, busy as a bee, or blind as a bat. Sorry. I can’t take the chance I remember the feeling of hot, spicy rum splashing inside when I heard a gentleman from the South one day say that something that was going on at the time made him ’‘happy as ^ mule eating briers.” He may very well not have been as happy as the fellow who was happy as a lark, but he made me a lot happier telling me about it. That lark is tired. I forget what, if any, associations that poor lark ever did conjure up in my fantasy the first time or two I heard it. I will never, however, forget the vision of a mule eating briers and beaming indolently from long, floppy ear to long, floppy ear.

  Why not roll your own cliches?

  They need not be brilliant. The girl doesn’t necessarily have to be as “sweet as a squashed-out honeydew melon” or “sexy enough to shatter a glass eye at eighty paces” to engender my interest in her, and my admiration for whoever it is who’s describing her. He doesn’t have to be as busy as a “dog trying to bury a bone on a marble floor” to merit my respect for his ambitious schedule. The businessman need not be “smooth as an eel going through Vaseline,” “low enough to read by the light of a hotfoot,” or “crooked enough to sleep in the shadow of a corkscrew” for me to beware his cunning. And he need not be “wiser than a treefull of owls” for me to want to seek his counsel.

  Official ratings of radio and TV shows didn’t get under way until this century, but man’s instinct to rate people and things around him is as old as any other human instinct. Cavemen knew which cave was a “6,” which brontosaurus an “8,” which cave woman a “10.”

  Who gets your higher rating, the one who complains that the task at hand is “hard as hell” or the one who says, “Hey, this is harder than trying to sneak dawn past a rooster”? Or “trying to diaper a baby wearing boxing gloves”?

  Your new home-rolled cliches don’t have to electrify like defected Russian ballet dancers. The best “mood” music in movies is the music you don’t even know you’re hearing. You know you’re hearing “happy as a lark.” Mind you, I don’t propose prison terms and deprivation of civil rights for‘using a line like that. We see the basketball player who commits a foul raise his hand. That tells that portion of the world watching, “I’m the one who did it.” Committing a cliche tells that portion of the world listening, “I hereby, in the unselfconscious uttering of that hoary old cliche, proclaim to one and all that I am a mediocre person in some, if not all, respects”!

  Sit. Think. Confect a galaxy of cliches to match your wardrobe that will fulfill all the roles cliches are called upon to fill, making sure to schedule periodic meditationals to come up with backups. (If a line is anything approaching clever, never”-use it twice before the same audience without a drying-out period of several weeks.)

  If I happen to have used that “happy as a mule eating briers” on Clem and Guemey already, then the next time I’ll be “happy as a possum chewing stumps” or a “woodchuck chasing ticks,” or something.

  Let that lark rest. That venerable lark can’t tote any more freight. Better, infinitely, to be merely happy than “happy as a lark.”

  The put-down, no matter how colorful, is no-win. He feels bad enough that he let that sidewinder missile of egg foo young hit his new silk necktie in front of so many loud laughers. He doesn’t need you to say, “Hey, man, you look good in everything you eat!” Your gain in that remark: a tiny, momentary, and quickly forgotten twitter from the “audience.” Your risk: the implantation of a festering resentment in his heart that, when multiplied, is the kind that incited masses to rise up and w the Dutch out of Indonesia? ‘

  A magazine writer^I wish I could credit him more specifically) many years ago wrote what I considered a hilarious piece about his desire to score with beastly clever lines, but never getting the breaks, never getting the chance the famous wits always seemed to get automatically. He complained he was always waiting there, ready with the material, but never getting the right moment to throw it into the conversation.

  He confessed, as one example, how he dreamed for years that someone in the conversation would lament the passing of a Mr. Kohler, whereupon somebody else would comment, “Oh, strange you should mention that. My neighbor is his funeral director, and I happen to know that’s his hearse going by outside right this minute. Look out the window.” Whereupon the first member of the conversation would say, “Oh,-no. The Mr. Kohler I mean passed away in Germany.” Whereupon the second member of the conversation would say, “I’m confused. That’s definitely Mr. Kohler’s hearse going by outside.”

  At which point our hero would yawn slightly and say, “Oh, that’s a hearse of a different Kohler.”

  There are more than a score of fundamentalist religious groups perched on mountaintops awaiting the end of the world. Their turn will probably come before that magazine writer’s. Never mind. Commit to color! Decide you want it. Go pearl-diving for the raw material. Stockpile your shticks. Keep on collecting. Keep on adapting. Seek out “connections.” You’ll get your moment.

  And poor Mr. Kohler won’t have to die for it.

  * * *

  “Dealing with him is like trying to nail a custard pie to the wall.”

  “She wasn’t wearing enough clothing to wad a shotgun shell.”

  “The drought was so bad we could only lick stamps on alternating days.”

  “He’s dumber than a barrel of hair.”

  “If a bird had his brains, he’d fly backward.”

  “He couldn’t hit the ground if he fell.”

  “I’d need a bombsight on my finger to dial the telephone. ” “He couldn’t find a bass fiddle in a phone booth.” “They’re crooked as a live oak limb.”

  “He could wear a top hat and walk under a snake’s belly.” “He’s a one-man Bermuda Triangle.”

  “He’s as impartial as a parking meter.”

  “She changes her mind more than a windshield wiper.” Hilarious? Of course not. Hilarity is not intended, required, or achieved. All we want is more colorful, thoughtful, amusing, different ways of saying the old familiar things that usually tempt cliches to come storming into our mental vacuum.

  Realizing you’re not contributing much color and making the decision to try to improve is over half the battle. Old Reader’s Digests and the other fresh and abandoned gold mines detailed above, plus the excavation and adaptation procedures also detailed above, will take care of the rest.

  A little luck won’t hurt, either. Like the right zinger coming to you at the right instant. And the right zinger coming to you at the right instant with the waiter not choosing that same instant to blurt in with “Who gets the veal?”

  Be glad if a lot of what you hear makes you say, “I wish I’d said that.”

  With luck, skill, effort, and style, you will!

  Annoy Not

  The one-armed man was quietly enjoying a drink at the bar.

  The man standing beside him suffered a seizure of curiosity.

  “Excuse me,” he said. “I notice you only have one arm.”

  The one-armed man put his drink gently upon the counter, looked slowly and delibera
tely down in the direction of his missing arm; then looked up straight into the eye of the questioner and said, “Dear me, I do believe you’re right!”

  The first rule of medicine is, the treatment shall do no harm.

  That’s also the first rule of Making People Talk. It seems easy. After all, only bullies, bigots, misanthropes, and psychopaths would seek to hurt, right?

  That is correct. But the big word there is “seek.” This chapter is devoted to those who do not seek to hurt, but do a creditable to brilliant job of it, anyway.

  Steve Carlin, the first of the genius breed of TV producers (“The $64,000 Question”) once chose an unlikely candidate to head up one of his TV projects, a young man who came across as much less outgoing, aggressive, imaginative, or knowledgeable than dozens of others who wanted the job.

  When asked why that particular young man was chosen, Carlin replied, “He knows how to deal non annoyingly.”

  So few people do. If the average person’s tongue were an airplane, it would be grounded. Fully 95 percent of all mouths should be shut down for repairs!

  “What’s new?” for an opening example, is an annoying way to be greeted. It implies that your vocation, your marital status, your interests and activities—in fact, your overall quotient of life achievement—left something to be desired at last report, but, in the spirit of you’re-not-down-until-you’re-out, the other person is willing to give you another chance. ‘ ‘What’s new?” is the verbal equivalent of passing in bridge, forfeiting in tournament play, and pleading nolo contendere when accused of a crime. For that fleeting moment, the one who says “What’s new?” gives the world a glance at the indicator needle of his intellectual gasoline tank—showing empty!

  “What do you do?” is another no-win clinker. Those involved in the lower-level occupations don’t like to have to say it out loud, and those way up the ladder are annoyed you don’t already bloody well know what they do.

  The Chinese, five thousand years advanced in such matters, have an especially uplifting way of saying “Pleased to meet you.” When you’re introduced to a Chinese, you shake his hand and say, “Jiu yang, jiu yang.” That means, “I have long heard of you and your lustrous reputation.” That’s nice. Ridiculous, but nice.

  If the American secretary of state were helicoptered down into a rice paddy in central Fukien Province for a media event and introduced by the local party secretary to a random peasant harvesting millet, he probably would not say, “I have long heard of you and your lustrous reputation. ’ ’ Under slightly less extenuated circumstances, however, he would.

  (Kristi Witker, popular news reporter for Channel 11 in New York, enjoys telling the story of the day she was covering something going on out at Yankee Stadium and asked Reggie Jackson, “What do you do?” It’s my guess that if Ms. Witker were not so popular—and secure—she might not enjoy telling the story so much. I have not yet verified whether Reggie Jackson enjoyed it!)

  “What do you do?” says a lot that you might not want to say that early in a first conversation with somebody. It says, “You and your works are not known to me, and I sense from your overall persona that you are of a level in life where that happens a lot, so I presume you’ll not take umbrage at my asking forthrightly how you manage to support yourself and your dependents.”

  Hold it a while. You can always ask what somebody does; but once you ask, you can never unask. There’s an excellent chance whoever you ask won’t mind being asked what he does. He may realize he’s not a high-profile person, not in the public arena, and he may think you don’t really want to get to know him if you don’t haul off and ask him what he does.

  On the other hand, he may (a) be ego-wounded that you don’t already know about his wondrous works or (b) be genuinely skeptical of your intelligence if you don’t already know.

  So why not play for all the marbles and bring in what you do in some clever, indirect way. Talk about some industries and occupations that ar£ Deing adversely or favorably affected by the current headlines, tell him he looks like a very successful banker-broker-lawyer-surgeon, something nice; ask for his card and look at it. But try to keep that direct question unasked, until the point where it becomes strained if you don’t know what he does.

  Some people have the ability to take something you say and turn it into a funny little quip. The problem is, many more people try than have the ability. Drafting others as your involuntary straight men is excusable only if your “capper” is explosively funny. The handful of people standing around who laugh at your tweaking of someone else’s line quickly forget the mirth you provided. The one who’s been topped however will never forget how you used him. Swallow that wisecrack, unless your conscience clearly tells you that in so doing, you’d be robbing the world of a monumental punch line.

  When you take a person’s comment and turn it into a laugh, even when it’s not at his expense, it tells him, “This guy is not a giver. He’s not a listener. He’s not a caring person. He’s an attention-getter who cares only about upping people and getting a laugh.”

  The boundary between a welcome wit and a wise guy may be impossible to define, but every one present “knows which side your remark has landed you on.

  Some people don’t mean to tell you with their eyes they couldn’t care less about the conversation you’re having; they simply physically can’t resist spinning around to see who just came into the room. That says, “Civilization and courtesy combine to keep me in some sort of tenuous contact with you, but surely you’ll understand, the likes of me are out for bigger game!”

  If secret agents can be trained to withstand torture, surely you can train yourself not to let your physical attentiveness, visibly deflect from the person you’re talking to!

  Espionage has given us a marvelous new meaning for the word “traffic.” Traffic, in this new meaning, is communication—not cars, words! All words exchanged during a party represent the “traffic” for that party. By using a technique known in intelligence as traffic analysis, you can learn a great deal about a country and the way its leadership, subleadership, armed forces, and diplomatic units operate and interrelate.

  Even before we break the code and learn precisely what’s being trafficked, we can detect who starts the talking and who does the listening, who does the asking and who does the answering, how many listeners-answerers there are, how regularly the traffic crackles, what to expect when irregular patterns of communication break out, etc.

  At a party, a little traffic analysis of your own will tell you some interesting things about the group, including, of course, where the “power” lies. For a split second after you arrive at the party, all guests seem equally powerful-worthy-valid-interesting. They start differentiating on your radar screens rather rapidly. One minute later you can tell the party’s ‘ ‘stars” from the “extras.” Five minutes later you’ve separated the one who merged the four silicone companies in a coup praised by The Wall Street Journal from the cousin of the host who’s a little shy.

  Ten minutes after entry, you should have a feel for who’s there for being powerful, who’s there for being connected, who’s there for being sexy, and who’s there for being able to make them all start talking and forget about who’s who and why who’s there.

  Study the traffic at any party and note what a high percentage of that traffic falls under the category of put-down.

  An alarmingly high proportion of remarks are designed to put others down rather than lift them up.

  If, for example, you’re from Alabama and you go to a party in New York City, keep score on what’s said when they learn you’re from Alabama.

  Catalogue the number of times the remark is something like, “Honey chile, is you-all sho-nuff from Alabammmie?” versus something like, “Alabama! I’ve heard so much about Alabama lately. I hope I can spend some time there. Tell me, if you had seventy-two hours to spend getting to know Alabama, how would you use those hours to best advantage?”

  (If you were the Alabaman, wh
ich of those two remarks would more inspire you to hire, buy from, vouch for, vote for, or introduce your sister to the perpetrator of? Be glad so many remarks are self-destructive and dumb. It means you can be an easy standout just by not making them.)

  Is put-down attractive? Does it really win people?

  Of course not. It’s exactly like smoking cigarettes used to be regarded: Each puff afforded a momentary lift, and the only consequences you faced (we thought) were nicotine stains on your forefingers and an occasional cough.

  Just as people feel health course through their bodies when they give up smoking, people feel health course through their traffic when they give up die put-down.

  Father Flanagan, who founded Boys Town, was written off as an early-day wimp for saying, “I never met a bad boy.”

  Upon pain of similar dismissal, I must avow that I have never met a boy or girl, man or woman, whom I could not compliment. Admittedly, that feat occasionally visits great strains upon the imagination, but I’ve never had to walk away in defeat.

  (Southern legend salutes a young man who similarly preferred to hand out compliments over insults to a degree just short of religiosity. His buddies, seeking to stump him, deliberately fixed him up on a blind date with the ugliest girl for six counties in any direction. That did, indeed, stump him, but only for the greater part of the evening. Just before he said good night at her door, however, the compliment he’d been fumbling for finally came to him.

  “You know, Mary Lou,” he said, “for a fat girl you don’t sweat much when you dance!”)

  Make that southerner your role model and you’ll soar!

  The critic who wrote of the actor who played the role of King Lear, “He played the king like he was aftaid somebody else would play the ace,” probably had that line ready before the opening curtain and sat through the entire performance in fear that the “king” would give slightly too good a performance to make that gem viable.