BoJo calls the COP26
Boris Johnson is to Get Wit Quick what Alfred E. Neuman was to MAD magazine. Or, if you must, what Sylvester P. Smythe was to Cracked magazine.
I just can’t quit that shaggy-haired mascot, mainly because we have a funny sort of mission alignment: We’re both trying to prove there’s a formula for wit. Wit keeps slipping away, but that’s what makes it fun.
As featured in GWQ No. 117, the British Prime Minister’s September speech to the United Nations hit six key marks:
Cheap puns
Needless erudition
Winking euphemisms
Anglicisms
The occasional elegant sentence
And a groaner for a headline
That, I maintain, is the perfect Boris speech, his personal equation for rhetorical success. So I was pleased to see that he touched nearly all those bases again this week as he opened the United Nations COP26 climate summit in Glasgow. In reverse order:
6. The groaner headline
“Welcome to Glasgow and to Scotland whose most globally famous fictional son is almost certainly a man called James Bond who generally comes to the climax of his highly lucrative films strapped to a doomsday device desperately trying to work out which coloured wire to pull to turn it off while a red digital clock ticks down remorselessly to a detonation that will end human life as we know it, and we are in roughly the same position, my fellow global leaders, as James Bond today.”
5. Occasional elegance
“Furious rhythm” here is quite nice, in a Koyaanisqatsi kind of way.
“The doomsday device is real and the clock is ticking to the furious rhythm of hundreds of billions of pistons and turbines and furnaces and engines with which we are pumping carbon into the air faster and faster.”
And then he really lands the metaphor:
“We in the developed world must recognise the special responsibility to help everybody else to do it because it was here in Glasgow 250 years ago that James Watt came up with a machine that was powered by steam that was produced by burning coal and yes my friends — we have brought you to the very place where the doomsday device began to tick.”
4. Needless erudition
Can BoJo work the words “slipways” and “sextant” into this speech? Of course he can!
“In the years since Paris the world has slowly and with great effort and pain, built a lifeboat for humanity. Now is the time to give it a mighty shove into the water, like some great liner rolling down the slipways of the Clyde, take a sextant sighting on 1.5c, and set off on a journey to a cleaner, greener future.”
3. Anglicism
“We have the interpreters and the meeting rooms and if all else fails we have the unbeatable hospitality and refreshment of Glasgow.”
Refreshment = alcohol.
2. Winking euphemisms
Whereas before he hit upon the methane of bovine farts, now it’s the more technically correct burps.
“Even if this conference ends with binding global commitments for game-changing real world action, two weeks from now smokestacks will still belch in industrial heartlands, cows will still belch in their pastures — even if some brilliant Kiwi scientists are teaching them to be more polite.”
The one category tweak to be made is in regard to the cheap puns. The original example from his General Assembly speech was:
“In fact we produce so much offshore wind that I am thinking of changing my name to Boreas Johnson in honour of the North Wind.”
Which was actually proof of punning, yes, but more importantly of ...
1. Self-effacement
Which is the BoJo trademark par excellence.
“We may not feel much like James Bond — not all of us necessarily look like James Bond — but we have the opportunity, the duty, to make this summit the moment when humanity finally began, and I stress began, to defuse that bomb.”
A laugh at his expense, after all, is still a laugh. Laugh and the world laughs with you; cry and you decarbonize alone.
Quick quips; lightning
“Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results.”
— Margaret Atwood
“The longer I live, the more I am inclined to the belief that this earth is used by other planets as a lunatic asylum.”
— George Bernard Shaw
“I knew I was going to take the wrong train, so I left early.”
— Yogi Berra
Speaking of...
Uncomfortable truths
Residents of 10 Downing Street
What, GWQ No. 122 worry? Well, maybe a bit. I’ve yet to see the new Bond movie but I hear he drinks alcohol and shoots people. The euphemism “overly refreshed” deserves wider use. In BoJo news I’d missed, he appears to have coined the term “funkapolitan,” as in “We represent the most jiving, hip-happening and generally funkapolitan party in the world.” By those measures, Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting was specifically funkapolitan. Give the ❤️ below a mighty shove.