The Art of Conversation - Catherine Blyth [52]
That whiskery chap with the slow way of speaking has a trove of experience. So be patient, let him share it. You’ll be the richer.
➺ Rule ten: Be kind to the bore
One day, he could be you.
TYPOLOGY OF BORES, CHORES, AND OTHER CONVERSATIONAL BEASTS
DEAF IN BOTH EARS Ambiaures inauditae egotissimus
Least forgivable are those ostensibly interesting bores, bereft of curiosity, complacently accustomed to consider being in their presence a privilege. Anyone who has been pursued by famous, rich, or older men will recognize the problem. You say gold digger; I say danger money.
With a shrug DIBE kills the question he dislikes. With a swivel of the eye he heckles any other who durst hold the floor.
“The point is,” he says, a prehensile fist smashing the table, if you venture a comment that strays from his preferred narrative line.
But while his self-importance often reaps fat rat-race rewards, DIBE usually has a dead-eyed spouse in tow, as well as an entourage of failed relationships—consoling testimony to the social limits of tunnel vision.
Tactics: Remind DIBE you exist. Make comparisons, seek advice, offer counterexamples to curtail the monologue: “Reminds me of when I did X.” If DIBE is toxic, attack the core: smugness. Sympathize at each boast: “How awful-looking after so many houses!”, “Don’t businesses like that go under?”
Pluses: Since the demise of Dynasty, how many opportunities exist to pity the spoiled rich? Those sad, lonely billionaires . . .
8
WIT TO WOO On Humor as Social Engineering
Is your catchphrase “Just joking”? Perhaps it’s time to revise your repartee. How about this:
Two cannibals, eating a clown. One says to the other, “Does this taste funny to you?”
It worked for Tommy Cooper, the madcap magician-comic, who knew well that humor, like clown meat, is a matter of taste. But now, if I told it, quietly, in a quick, breathless burst, I guarantee the gag would pass you by.
I never crack jokes. Not that I don’t try to be funny; I just prefer a side approach, smuggling humor into comments so that, if nobody notices, the custard pie is not on me—or so I like to think. Why bother at all? Robert Louis Stevenson nailed it:
Talk has none of the freezing immunities of the pulpit.... A jest intervenes, the solemn humbug is dissolved in laughter.
If nothing else, Harvard University investigators have found that those who stride on life’s sunny side outlive misery guts, which may well be because they are not lonely, since humor is the electricity of intimacy. It helps us forget ourselves, braces emotional suspension, exercises minds, garnering friends and power, from bedroom to boardroom.
Cicero recalled Julius Caesar as a young lawyer:
so superior to one and all in wit and repartee that, even in forensic speeches, he prevailed over the arguments of other advocates with his conversational style.
Anyone can profit from humor. Yet I’m not alone in my fear of skidding on the banana skin of a slack wisecrack, nor my tendency to chuckle at the merest sniff of wit from someone else. Such cowardly tendencies are prudent social politics. And for all the mystique misting ideas about what makes something funny, laughter turns out to be an ultrapractical conversational fix-it. Eight times out of ten, wit has nothing to do with it.
What can this mean? For a start, anyone can be funnier—without being funny—if he appreciates how laughter works.
THE SOCIAL CONJUROR
Imagine there was a magic word that could, like a snap of the fingers, wind someone up, calm him down, make him listen, draw him near, send him packing, change the subject, or let you say what you want and get away with it?
There is. It’s “Ha-ha-ha.” And that’s not all it can do.
Neuroscientist Robert Provine had a hunch that laughter was more significant to communication than some fellow academics credited. With difficulty, he raised funds to investigate twelve hundred “laugh episodes” (moments of dialogue followed by laughter, in typical social situations). To his amazement,
only about 10 percent to 20 percent