The Realpolitik of Dinner Party Diplomacy
…Or: How I Learned to Use Literary Humour to Save the Evening
The Incident:
It all began to go a little pear-shaped when I happened to mention that I had once seen an actor from the 7de Laan soap opera – the one with a mole on his chin – on an escalator at the Hyde Park Corner shopping centre.
It was late into the meal, coffee had been served. I had managed to coast comfortably through the evening’s various courses and list of inevitable conversation topics: politics (“things are looking dark, but we’ll get them in the next election”), sport (“things aren’t looking too good for us, but we’ll get them in the next game”), the best website to download the new season of Game Of Thrones (TorrentzFreakz, apparently) and later, as the wine flowed a little more freely, sex (“we’re having none, but maybe we’ll have a go on his birthday”), religion (“we’re having none of it…but we might go in for Christmas”) and salaries (“we have it all, thank God…yet not enough, fuck!”) . So far my wife and I had made it through yet another modern dinner party relatively unscathed, or so it seemed until I triggered the tripwire of the world’s most inane landmine.
In what felt like an eternity, the lawyer dropped his spoon loudly into his coffee cup, and his wife looked nervously in the opposite direction. The CPA, who was gay, coughed back the last sip of a stale scotch, its final, disintegrating ice cube violently concussed as he brought it down onto the glass table top. His plus-one for the evening, the latest formula in a long row of calculations on the CPA’s extensive spread sheet, who had been a completely uncouth and wholly unlikable periphery player throughout the evening, triumphantly snapped off a piece of cheesecake crust and popped it into his smirking mouth, as if to say: ‘guess now I don’t seem so bad after all, do I?’
The architect’s wife, our hostess for the evening, stood up from the table rapidly and stumbled off, like a survivor from a car crash, into the living room, murmuring quietly about checking on the kids. The architect himself remained seated opposite me, the rotting corpse of my anecdote between us. He stared at me with a latent but anxious lividness, seemingly trying to decide whether he should simply ask me to leave, or call the authorities to do it for him. I offered him a half-hearted smile and looked over at my wife, whose eyes shrieked: ‘Fix this! Fix this! For the love of God, do something to fix this!’
The Revelation:
As I sat there in the loneliness of the awkward, a wave of heartburn from sudden social anxiety and overdone chicken à la king overwhelmed me. I closed my eyes, hoping this might all be some horrible dream. My mind ran to a storage facility all the way in the back of my head. There sat, next to an old rusty filing cabinet, the spectre of my old Scottish father, himself an undisputed master of dinner party conversation and social anecdote (he once gave a rousing reading of an epic Robert Burns poem around a disastrous braai that his friends still talk about in hushed, reverent tones). In his hands he held open the Complete Works of SJ Perelman, the renowned American literary humourist who always had the knack for a quick-witted, sharp gab.
On the page, he pointed out a passage, words I had heard spoken by my father in some of his more awkward dinner party moments, a quote that would almost always save the evening. I had never understood it myself before, but as I read it now, I know these were the words that would save face, indeed, very well save our reputations.
I cleared my throat politely, smiled gently at the architect’s wife and in small measured, confident phrases, delivered: “Gaynor, my dear, I must apologise for my rudeness just then. I think, from now on you”ll have to leave my meals on a tray outside the door because I’ll be working pretty late on the secret of making myself invisible, which may take me almost until eleven o”clock.”
Silence. For a moment I wasn’t sure if the words had worked. The CPA and his friend, I could see, hadn’t even heard me say it, let alone understand it. The architect’s face had remained stony. The lawyer and his wife, both grim-faced, appeared conspiratorial, I was sure he had just slyly passed a business card to my wife. Gaynor, the architect’s wife, stared back at me.
A short sharp “Ha” escaped from her mouth. It contained more surprise than sarcasm. A smile and attractive giggling followed, and I knew I had won her over, and the others would soon follow. My wife reached for my hand under the table and squeezed her approval. Soon the table was abuzz again, the moment unfrozen, and earth’s axis corrected. The architect looked over at me, a fattening smile evolving on his face: “how about a brandy in the drawing room, old boy?”
In the back of my mind I triumphantly high-fived my old Scottish father and smacked a thankful lippy kiss onto the Complete Works of SJ Perelman.
The Arsenal:
From the droll doodlings on walls around ancient Rome – like the infamous “semper ubi sub ubi (always where under where [sic])” – to people who send in jokes about the workplace to Readers’ Digest, the wry and wicked musings of the humble literary humourist have been around since the dawn of modern civilisation; it is only recently that they’ve started to get paid a little better.
Here is a vital list of names and select phrases that one should have an extensive knowledge of or at the very least, hastily written down on a napkin, ready for every conceivable dinner party emergency.
PJ O’Rourke
Who? The only person to have more entries in The Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations is Oscar Wilde; O’Rourke is “either the funniest man alive, or the wittiest heterosexual of all time.” All we know is that he has, for over 30 years, been the acceptable face and the one single sane voice of American conservatism. PJ has written and commented sardonically on everything from American politics, sport, war, modern manners and, in some of his best, cars. Now an elder statesman of letters and in-depth but extremely funny insight into academic texts such as Adam Smith’s economist bible Wealth Of Nations, O’Rourke was once a contemporary of Hunter Thompson and Tom Wolfe, pushing the gonzo journalism envelope with much needed humour and sensibility.
The Opening Hand: “You know your children are growing up when they stop asking you where they came from and refuse to tell you where they’re going.”
Guaranteed Awkward Silence: “There are a number of mechanical devices which increase sexual arousal, particularly in women. Chief among these is the Mercedes-Benz 380SL convertible.”
Big Gun: “A hat should be taken off when greeting a lady, and left off the rest of your life. Nothing looks more stupid than a hat.”
Death Blow: “Making fun of born-again Christians is like hunting dairy cows with a high powered rifle and scope.”
Emergency Ejector Seat Handle: @PJORourke
SJ Perelman
Who? A graduate from the Marx Brothers school of comedy, where he helped Groucho create some of his most immortal lines, Perelman was from the golden age of literary humour, playing a regular foil and capable challenger to the ultimate doyenne of dinner party banter and the caustic one-liner: Dorothy Parker, who once recalled: “every time he writes, he takes a leap that causes you to say ‘now wait a minute’, but (that minute) is so well worth waiting for.” Highly adaptable, Perelman worked prodigiously in cartooning, screenwriting, theatre and socio-political journalism.
The Opening Hand: “Love is not the dying moan of a distant violin – it’s the triumphant twang of a bedspring.”
Guaranteed Awkward Silence: “A farm is an irregular patch of nettles bounded by short-term notes, containing a fool and his wife who didn’t know enough to stay in the city.”
Big Gun: (On writing) “I guess I’m just an old mad scientist …give me an underground laboratory, half a dozen atom-smashers, and a beautiful girl in a diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee, and I care not who writes the nation’s laws.”
Death Blow: “The main obligation is to amuse yourself”
Emergency Ejector Seat Handle: None, but see The Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup .
Bill Bryson
Who? The missing link between Mark Twain and slice-of-lifer Dave Barry, travel writer Bryson is the quintessential American intellectual abroad, offering homey but acerbic observations on language, history, science and on the world in general; in particular, the idiosyncrasies of his country of birth that are intelligent, humourous and highly quotable. Legend has it that no one has ever finished any of his books over fears of laughter induced heart attacks. Bryson’s laidback, easy to understand style is particularly useful for the less-than book smart dinner guest who would gleefully enjoy correcting the Voltaire quote, the origins of the word ‘spam’ or the GNP of Sri Lanka offered by the pompous blowhard across the table.
The Opening Hand: “Of all the things I am not very good at, living in the real world is perhaps the most outstanding.”
Guaranteed Awkward Silence: “My first rule of consumerism is never to buy anything you can”t make your children carry.”
Big Gun: “Hunters will tell you that a moose is a wily and ferocious forest creature. Nonsense. A moose is a cow drawn by a three-year-old.”
Death Blow: “I refer of course to the soaring wonder of the age known as the Eiffel Tower. Never in history has a structure been more technologically advanced, materially obsolescent, and gloriously pointless all at the same time.”
Emergency Ejector Seat Handle: None, but check Youtube for an extensive collection of Bryson videos.
Andy Borowitz
Who? The unlikely mind behind The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, comedian Borowitz now spends his days as the funniest person in cyberspace, offering some of his most biting wit in 142 character chunks on Twitter and Facebook. Just as potent in long form, his columns for the New Yorker and the Huffington Post are some of the most read and most quoted literary political satire since Mark Twain. His running commentary on US politics and world events is essential, historical reading. His rapid-fire, clever, sometimes smug, sometimes self-deprecating observations are perfect spit balls for confrontational dinner parties with more conservative friends.
The Opening Hand: “(the war in) Iraq is like (TV’s) Lost: it ended, but no one knows what the (hell) it was all about.”
Guaranteed Awkward Silence: “Call me a dreamer, but I think it would be great if getting medical attention were as easy as getting a gun.”
Big Gun: “The only possible reason the Republicans have declared a war on women is they must think women have oil.”
Death Blow: “If you buy your July 4 supplies at Wal-Mart you can celebrate our independence from Britain and our dependence on China at the same time.”
Emergency Ejector Seat Handle: @BorowitzReport, but be warned things get a little frantic here. Highly addictive, too.
Stephen Fry
Who? The proverbial gentleman’s gentleman of letters. Of all modern humourists, Fry is the one man you would want in a verbose and bloody word fight. Actor, writer, social commentator and serial tweeter, Fry, inspired in part by literary hero, the prolifically classicist PG Wodehouse, offers intelligent and profound observations on all aspects of modern life. A veritable rapier with a metaphor, Fry can switch comfortably between boorish and urbane, forthright and whimsical, and deadly serious touched with more than a bit of the absurd. Through several books, television programmes – the Fry In America documentary series is highly recommended – and a fertile online presence, Stephen Fry offers a stylish and cultured trove of literate riches suitable for every situation.
The Opening Hand: “Those who rule the world get so little opportunity to run about and laugh and play in it.”
Guaranteed Awkward Silence: “(Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code) is complete loose stool water. It is arse-gravy of the worst kind.”
Big Gun: “Sex without smiling is as sickly and as base as vodka and tonic without ice.”
Death Blow: “Language is my whore, my mistress, my wife, my pen-friend, my check-out girl. Language is a complimentary moist lemon-scented cleansing square or handy freshen-up wipette. Language is the breath of God, the dew on a fresh apple, it’s the soft rain of dust that falls into a shaft of morning sun when you pull from an old bookshelf a forgotten volume of erotic diaries; language is the faint scent of urine on a pair of boxer shorts, it’s a half-remembered childhood birthday party, a creak on the stair, a spluttering match held to a frosted pane, the warm wet, trusting touch of a leaking nappy, the hulk of a charred Panzer, the underside of a granite boulder, the first downy growth on the upper lip of a Mediterranean girl, cobwebs long since overrun by an old Wellington boot.”
Emergency Ejector Seat Handle: @stephenfry. Like going to university, only shorter.
Originally published at imagineathena.com.
