Let’s get trivial
Ruth Spencer suggests ways of leading the conversation at the festive dinner table
’Tis the season for having dinner. Unfortunately it’s dinner with people you wouldn’t normally dine with, like distant relatives or your wife’s boss. This can be a trying time in any year, and the American elections have put many controversial topics on the table like the mince pies of discord. However, with a few amusing facts and anecdotes you can fascinate your way through the dinner party season, smoothing the ruffles of the conversational tablecloth and actually have a good time.
Having a conversation with someone you don’t know well is fraught with danger. It’s too easy to witter on about traditionally safe ground like the All Blacks, only to find out their cat was once run over by an All Black.
The traditional advice is to ask lots of questions and do plenty of listening, but this is also the training given to interrogating officers. It’s terrible advice, leaving your victim feeling interfered with and knowing nothing about you, which is a shame, because you’re very interesting. Instead, offer your favourite random fact and ask them for theirs. Thus when you reveal that no one can verify who invented the fire hydrant because the patent was destroyed in a fire, you may be surprised and thrilled to hear them tentatively assert that the Joshua Kadison song Jessie is actually about Sarah Jessica Parker. Then you can get on to which of SJP’s works is her best (1985’s Girls Just Want To
Have Fun, obviously) and which should be burnt in a fire (2010’s Sex and the City 2, obviously) and you’re on your way to real friendship.
Facts can save a party from disaster. When Uncle Dave draws a preparatory breath and the eyes of every guest glaze in panic at the approach of a smutty punchline, leap in with something mind-blowing. “Sorry to interrupt you Dave, but when you said ‘knob’ just then you reminded me that the doorknob wasn’t patented until 1878!” Or quickly top up his water glass while observing that the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River puts so much water through it has slowed the rotation of the Earth. Aunty Di will claim that’s actually her party trick, only with wine, and the conversation will divert toward an apocalyptic discussion of the world’s rotational forces. You can sit back and let them wonder ludicrous things like whether the Earth will eventually rotate in reverse; if so maybe you’ll go back in time to when Uncle Dave’s joke wasn’t offensive.
Perhaps the conversation wanders beyond your ability to contribute. You have nothing to add on the metaphorical significance of knots in Moby Dick, so you sit silently, eyeing the last potato. Seize the day (and carpe potato) by distracting the other diners with a semi-relevant fact. “I believe,” you remark casually while helping yourself to the spud, “that there are whales still living today that were alive when Moby Dick was written in 1851.” Your guests are agog. “Wait, so there are whales older than doorknobs?” As your fact-harpoon plunges into the conversational blubber and Dave unfortunately remembers his unfinished joke, you’re free to reflect on all those whales enduring endless years of aimless drifting, not unlike this dinner party. At least you got the potato.
If you’re the host, you will have spent many hours and many dollars preparing a feast that will be entirely consumed in the thirty seconds you were out of the room to get the festive napkins. It can be demoralising to realise that you butterflied a turkey when for all anyone noticed you could have stuck parsley on some KFC and flung a bag of dinner rolls into what was, 10 minutes ago, a pot-pourri bowl.
Being the cook is an opportunity to pepper the conversation with interesting titbits that will linger long after the meal is forgotten, like cellulite. “Some stuffing?” you ask, brandishing the soggy lump you just removed from the grim, bony interior of a dead bird. If they decline, force some on to their plate by telling them stuffing is full of pronyl-lysine, a cancer-fighting antioxidant that inhabits only bread crust. Or casually mention that the turkey was nearly the American national bird and was only just pipped at the post by the bald eagle. Or if the adulation is lacking, point out that the Argentinian festive season dinner is cold veal with tuna sauce, which you could whip up if they’d rather. Passive aggression is the privilege of the cook.
Thus with a few hours’ preparation, a smartphone hidden under the tablecloth or even a few nights out at pub quizzes with a notebook, you can become something of a raconteur and save every dinner party from itself. At least, that’s the idea; it’s not necessarily a fact. Uncle Dave knows a surprising number of jokes.