Paul Sills

PoSt MoDeRn CoNvERsaTiOnS

WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT WHAT WE TALK ABOUT LIKE WE NEVER TALKED ABOUT IT BEFORE

My compliments to the ocean.

Dick Cavett in a restaurant after being served a nice piece of fish.

A good folk journalist makes for a good emcee. Like Mr. Cavett, bringing the table together. A Master of Ceremonies. Bring on the Fun Conversations. That’s me!

How does one speak MC ?

Here’s one thing to try: Offer remarks that bring the most amount of people together at one time:

“Well, it looks like introductions are in order!”

“Did you make that yourself?”

“What’s your sign?” (Mine is Slippery When Wet. Thanks to Wavy Gravy for this.)

From “Twentieth Century Etiquette, An Up-To-Date Book For Polite Society” by Annie Randall White

So are you ready to emcee yourself?

[See QUICK OPENERS, DECEMBER 7 2015 for Paul Sills’ advice: “Encourage the laggards.”]

Expert Catherine Blythe suggests in her book The Art of Conversation aiming for about four minutes before cutoff. No longer than that. Keep that convo moving, “like a good game of Frisbee.” Otherwise, she says, it becomes boring — I mean, people and their freakin’ monologues, right?

http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-Conversation-Neglected-Pleasure/dp/1592404979

Q: What is having to listen to somebody talk for fifty minutes and not getting paid?

A: The opposite of therapy!

How does a folk journalist avoid that happening?

A lot of people get into conversations just to let you know who they are. They have no interest in you. (Hard to believe, right?) So why bother listening to them playing the same tape made-to-impress? And how to get an edge in word-wise and actually have conversations with people who talk a lot?

Folk journalists know that wrangling the ego of such a talker takes semi-masterful talk techniqueing. So here’s how to enjoy listening to them, even as they go on and on ad infinitum.

The growing field of Ethnomonology* is here. Finally!

Taught online usually, for profit, and soon to be a major growth industry, ETM teaches that humanity’s monologues may actually teach us about said person rattling saying along. There’s the guy who narrates his lives as he goes through it. Often you see him with ear buds and a phone, describing what corner he’s approaching (BEING HERE THEN!). He often uses Elmore Leonard’s “marijuana tense”** which author Martin Amis describes as dialogue using a present participle that creates a hazy sort of meandering now: “Bobby saying,” and then the dialogue follows.

If this seems difficult to handle, don’t despair. Think this is hard — try living in Papua, New Guinea; at least one tribe there speaks in 17 different tenses.

Languages of Papua: http://www.ethnologue.com/country/PG/languages

“You get my drift?”

– I’m following your smoke.

Still however, you may find yourself learning very little by listening. Nothing, maybe?

When walking with such individually-linked to themselves lingua leaders, remember this: Out amongst his own self, desiring nothing more than to be marveled at/gazed upon, heard in all his incredible incrudibleness, which he believes after all to be the next evolutionary stage of a human being — doubtful: By observing you may still pick up a lot of visual information to enjoy and/or play with.

Or as Yogi Bear once put it: Heyyy Boo Boo, from this viewpoint we can get a better outlook! (Or was that Yogi Berra?)

But if all your emcee attempts fail, chalk it up to what Holden Caulfield describes as, referring to conversations, “Goddam boring ones.” In Catcher In The Rye, he gets involved in more than two dozen confabs. But don’t worry, some of them he finds, “slightly intellectual.” ***

Finally, if still in doubt, you can blame it on The System, referring yourself to this Firesign Theater video:

Confidence in The System https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDqk8o6y13Y&feature=kp]

Enjoy!

* Invented for entertainment purposes only.

** Elmore Leonard’s “marijuana tense” http://austinkleon.com/2005/12/22/elmo-leonards-present-participle/

*** J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher In The Rye is terrific for lovers of conversation: http://mentalfloss.com/article/64836/13-things-you-might-not-know-about-catcher-rye

with Paradise Lost at UCSD — Paradise Lost found near Geisel Library on the campus of UCSD

The goal: to get to where the words fall, from a muse-filled sky, down through your mind, and off the end of your quilled tongue. Author Ken Kesey

Comedy loves heart. Paul Sills, founding guru at Second City

At the feet of the great satirist Paul Krassner *

Ready for a few folk journalistically-tested quick openers?

These convo firestarters tend to be terse, bent toward further conversage.

(For one-liners bent toward getting the heck out of a bad conversation in one quick of a hurry SEE WITCRAFT How to Extricate From Any Conversation — TK)

But hey, you take a chance, am I right? The cartoonist Mark Alan Stamaty of “Macdoodle Street” fame in the Village Voice, drew one that I kept above my typewriter for years. Its theme: “You have to risk it all every day!”

Now some folks have, as it has become known through cultural history, “the gift for gab.” (In some parts of the country: “the gift of gab.”) Usually these high-energy individuals are able to get away with lines like, “Is that a smile? Are you smiling right now?”

Or this one:

Quick Opener, “Don’t they miss you?” Semi-startled, you answer: “Who?”

Quick Opener Comeback: “Heaven. I know they must be missing an angel right about now.”

Yuck. By adding authenticity to your game, you can avoid this superficial subtext–shallower-than-spit level of a conman. Here’s how to insert yourself into another person’s space. Do what Paul Sills, guru of Second City advises. His mother Viola Spolin wrote the first handbook on improvisational theater games and Sills told us in an NYC class one day something I’ve never forgotten: “Encourage the laggards.”

He meant that in the everyday battle for existence, leaning inside with a quick jab, uttering the first sentence, is not that hard. So try to encourage those you cannot.

“You are in the safest place in the universe,” he’d tell us. “On a stage.”

Our teacher was right. What a safety in freedom we all felt about firing that first volley. We could say anything. Perhaps Sills’ approach came from Shakespeare’s “As You Like It,” wherein Jacques says: “The whole world is a stage, and all the men and women merely actors.”

But how can you continue offstage, backstage, in real life, without acting out every anxiety, all your neuroses falling out all over everybody because after all, Shakespeare’s Jacques was a melancholy man after all.

Think of professional athletes who “make a play.” A folk journalist is just as serious about playmaking. (And often makes plays at being serious, too.) What do I mean by this?

Make a play for making room enough so a conversation can become as big as your subject’s world. Because when you explore, you find interesting people. People get more interesting by telling you a tale. They might reveal their dreams, or say something obscene, something simple as recalling an episode of their favorite show, or talk about where they went that time with their first love.

BACK POCKET BANTER (Other Quick Openers)

Noticing how pictures on the fronts of t-shirts are just about the same size as a small TV screen, “What is that funny thing on your shirt?”

From mall to boardwalk, it is easy to be encourageable, “Where did you buy that lovely dress? Did you make it yourself?”

“Is that good? What you’re reading. What’s it about?”

“I love the rain don’t you?” (Stolen from Woody Allen where his next line is, “It washes the memories off the sidewalks of life.” May be inapplicable in some western climes.)

“Do you hear that? What’s that song they’re playing?”

Even, “Whacha’ doin?” when gently expressed can get the ball to their side. The Beatles did a whole song with that as their title. **

“I really admire your shoes” is most always welcomed by young women.

And young men have been known to lead with one of the following three:

“Yo!” “Wazzup?” And, “Nice car! Hey!”

Or the equally played betimes: “Hey! Nice car!”

NEXT TIME: “Onward!” Author Henry Miller and radio storyteller Jean Shepherd both said this I think, although Jean (flicklives.com) was more known for “Excelsior!”

* Hear my conversation with Paul Krassner, publisher of The Realist and co-founder of the Youth International Party: The Yippies!

http://www.scpr.org/programs/offramp/2012/11/27/29428/paul-krassner-turned-on-groucho-and-told-john-yoko/

* * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpWrNS2UTgA

PoMo ConVo

Quick Openers: Sure Fire Ways To Clever Convo