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next year to reduce the number. From a great many, I now have only two. I hope to get over these too — it seems impossible, but only a few years ago there were an additional three I thought I never could overcome. If you want to be a welcome conversationalist, it is better to be a person who invites teasing and reacts gracefully to it, than to be the teaser. It is said of Lincoln that while he "liked to tell a joke on others, he also had the rare faculty of being able to appreciate one on himself" (Abraham Lincoln, ed. Edward Wagenknecht [New York: Creative Press, 1947], p. 575). This "rare faculty" is one a good conversationalist positively must strive for. The way to react to teasing and so to stimulate the conversation wittily is to twist the shaft directed against one into a sort of compliment, no matter how farfetched. A bald person can retort, "Why, my long hard thinking is beginning to show. I notice it doesn't show on you!" This will be fun for everyone, promote the talk. A freckled person might retort with mock meekness, "Yes, I suffer from a curious affinity with the sun — forces me to reflect sunlight all about — even on those unworthy of it." A color-blind person can say, "Just think how much pain I am spared when I have to look at your neckties. And how much pain I can give you with mine — and that with no malice aforethought!" A fat girl might say, "Just think how much more the fellow who marries me will get for his money." If I had not been so sensitive about my handed-down suit, and had answered, "Can I help it if my family goes way back and I have to sit on its patches?" a stream of most probably highly good-natured banter would have been provoked. |
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