Lightning rounds in a bottle
Or, questions to electrify small talk
Every brain is a lock and every question is a key. If you can just pose the right query to the right person in the right way, you can open them up.
For instance, if you asked the brilliant writer Armando Iannucci this:
If you were absolutely put on the spot, what would be your best explanation of how a television works?
He might answer:
Someone with an idea films it, sends it in and then finds it replaced by a worse one.
This is the practical application of G.K. Chesterton’s theory that no one is uninteresting though plenty of people are uninterested. By this standard, journalists are the professionally interested, and it’s their calling to find the questions that make the uninteresting drop their uns.
The single best example of this in recent memory — and the source of the above Q & A — is “Why Are You Asking Me This?”, an article in The Fence, a British satirical magazine. “As part of a very important ongoing series,” goes the setup, “The Fence asks very important questions of very important people.”
It is in essence a lightning round, a term that entered the popular imagination as a rapid-fire bonus segment on the game show Password in the 1960s. In journalism it’s come to mean a series of non-sequiturs to which the best answer is a pithy one. In her New York Times Style section profiles, Maureen Dowd uses the format to good effect under the heading Confirm or Deny, as when she recently confronted director Baz Luhrmann with this provocation:
If Elvis were alive, he would be hanging out at Mar-a-Lago.
I would say no. I just don’t think he would socialize.
In The Fence’s version, the questions are a perfect blend of deep and mundane, such as:
What’s the best flightless bird?
To which the writer Ian Rankin replies:
Roast chicken.
Ignoring a question is not an answer, as your silence can be used against you:
Is prune juice the juice removed from plums to turn them into prunes, or is it juice further removed from prunes?
[The Estate of T S Eliot declined to respond.]
Similarly, the question “Do you think the Queen has ever had a Coke Zero?” went unanswered by Buckingham Palace. When you consider that HRH was 80 when that particular beverage was launched, you have to assume not. (But maybe to toast her Platinum Jubbly?) It’s a nice corollary to this classic Ben Jenkins poser: Do older people know who Mario is? (“They can’t say ‘That’s a computer game guy’ or ‘That’s the little jumping fellow from the whatsit.’”) We all experience popular culture differently, and the gaps can be remarkably deep.
You don’t have to be overtly funny to win a lightning round. Consider the question:
Do dogs’ barks constitute language?
To which Noam Chomsky (really? apparently!) replied:
There’s no ‘Yes or No’ about analogies. I can jump. Is it like an eagle? From some points of view.
The great promise of the lightning round is that a perfectly glib question can reveal a larger truth. In an MTV town hall in 1994, a 17-year-old girl asked President Bill Clinton whether he wore boxers or briefs. Subsequent presidents have wisely dodged this question, as in retrospect it revealed Clinton was all too game to talk underwear with a young woman.
Another great truth: Monty Python only formed because everyone wanted to hang out with Michael Palin. In Palin’s answers to The Fence’s questions, you can see why:
Do you miss anything from the 20th century?
Oh yes. I miss the availability of public toilets. That and Cole Porter.
Do you save those little bags of desiccant you sometimes get in electrical goods packages?
I save them for my grandchildren, who don’t get enough desiccant.
Quick quips; lightning
“It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.”
— James Thurber
“Journalism is the ability to meet the challenge of filling space.”
— Rebecca West
“The art of newspaper paragraphing is to stroke a platitude until it purrs like an epigram.”
— Don Marquis
Speaking of…
The biggest questions
The smallest talk
Get Wit Quick No. 152 has enough desiccant for the time being. Prune juice is in fact derived from desiccated plums. Thanks to Greg Priestman for the Python fact, which he’d found in Rob Sheffield’s book Dreaming the Beatles in a chapter on how Ringo played the role of the one guy everyone liked in the Fab Four, likely because he always kept his pockets full of desiccant. The key to winning the lightning round is to neither overthink nor underthink. That’s the key to everything, actually, and certainly the key to my book Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting? Quick! Tap the❤️ below!