I’ve been spending a lot of time writing jokes recently. Have you heard the one about the next wave of Irish immigrants? Luckily, they’ll be coming by Ryanair so they’ll be indefinitely delayed.
Okay, it probably wouldn’t pass muster on Have I Got News For You, but it’s the best I can do. At this time of year I get asked to do a lot of after-dinner speaking and audiences don’t like it if you recycle old material. They want topical gags based on that day’s headlines.
‘Sorry I’m late,’ I told the patrons of the Oxford Society at their annual dinner at the House of Commons last week. ‘I had to fight my way through a bunch of sixth-formers at the visitors’ entrance. One of them was holding up a sign saying, “Nick Clegg’s a see you next Tuesday.” He’d spelt it right so he can’t have been at a comprehensive.’
That gag didn’t get the laugh I was expecting. (They often don’t.) The art of after-dinner speaking, I’ve discovered, is to sail close enough to the wind to give your audience a frisson of danger, but not so close that you end up offending them.
I came badly unstuck a couple of years ago with the following anecdote based on a real-life encounter with Gordon Ramsay. I was flying back from Los Angeles when I spotted the celebrity chef bent double over a stainless steel work surface looking as if he’d just prepared 350 in-flight meals. I marched up to him, tapped him on the shoulder and said, ‘I hate to have to say this, Mr Ramsay, but both the chicken and the beef were an absolute disgrace.’ Luckily, he was fairly good-humoured about it. He called me a c***, but not a f***ing c***.
The Association of Retired Librarians, which was paying a handsome sum to listen to stories like this, was not amused. ‘My members are not prudes,’ wrote the general secretary to my agent, ‘but the use of the “c” word in polite company is to me unacceptable and to use it twice was just insult to injury.’
The crucial thing is to know your audience. This was driven home to me by Gordon Brown, who had the misfortune to hear the best man’s speech I delivered at the wedding of his brother-in-law, Sean Macaulay. My opening gag did not go down well with the 200-plus American guests at Washington’s Chevy Chase Country Club. ‘Sean told me earlier he’s feeling quite relaxed today,’ I said. ‘It’s the first wedding he’s ever been to at which he doesn’t feel guilty about having f***ed the bride the night before.’ Total silence.
‘Your jokes were good, but the audience poor,’ wrote the ex-prime minister in a card to me afterwards. That was a more charitable reaction than Sean’s mother-in-law’s. ‘You were every bit as bad as I’d been led to expect,’ she said.
At the House of Commons last week I was introduced by Jane Ellison, the Conservative MP for Battersea and a staunch supporter of the campaign to set up a free school in her constituency. She told the audience I was going to say something about my own free school campaign, which was news to me. I quickly made some mental notes and managed to shoehorn something in midway through the speech, just after telling them the story of how I got into Oxford by mistake.
This part of the speech went over a lot better. The audience appeared to be listening to what I was saying and at several points broke into applause. Afterwards, plenty of people came up to shake my hand and ask if there was anything they could do to help. It was a useful reminder that, for all the noisy opposition to free schools, there is considerable public support, particularly among university graduates. Many of the people at the dinner were born to working-class parents and had only been able to get into Oxford thanks to a grammar school or a direct-grant school. They recognise that without substantial reform of state education, the current generation of bright, working-class children won’t have anything like the same opportunities they had.
I think in future I’m going to dispense with the jokes and focus on educational reform. Thanks in part to Gordon Brown, the poorer the audience, the more likely they are to respond well.
Toby Young is associate editor of The Spectator.
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