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Special Gifts, Devices, and Techniques - part 1

Of all, the one I most fear and envy is the gift of mimicry. I envy it because I possess none of it. I cannot even imitate Amos or Andy. I keenly regret that no one at home ever encouraged me to try it. And the reason why we were not encouraged is probably the very same reason that causes me to fear it. Mimicry is the easiest and surest way to be funny; but it is also the quickest way to hurt and belittle. Mimick­ing a Yiddish accent or a Pennsylvania Dutch accent is ir­resistibly funny, but it may not be so funny to the person or peoples mimicked. Mimicking, like cartooning, feeds upon peculiarities and magnifies them. Peculiarities are seldom things their possessors are proud of. A bald head is funny to the other fellow, but not to the owner. The play Cyrano de Bergerac is constructed around the fun the funmakers had with Cyrano's long nose and his sensitivenes on that point.

A gifted mimic's temptations to cause laughter at the expense of the other are besetting. If he is not an absolutely kindly, generous person he is sure to abuse his power. Nevertheless the gift of mimicry is one of the most valuable assets a conversationalist can have. Its power is not confined to belittling; it can also be used to imply a compliment. One may, for example, mimic someone who talks very dra­matically — and so in effect compliment him. One may mimic a person who, longing for it yet fearing it, declines the third cocktail — the mimicking will produce laughter but not hurt­ful laughter. A light touch of mimicry is nearly always suit­able in quoting anyone or in reproducing the various speak­ers of an anecdote. Mimicry, after all, is a phase of acting — and acting is one of the greatest of human arts. If I were a parent I would, with due warning against misuse, encourage my children to acquire the art. I advise anyone who has even an ounce of talent for it to improve himself in it.

Allied to mimicry is raillery, or teasing. While sarcasm and serious irony may be said not to belong to conversa­tion at all, raillery, teasing, "kidding" are indispensable parts of good conversation. The whole world remembers Goldsmith's saying to Johnson that if he tried to make fishes talk his goldfish would talk like whales. Though this clinched the point against Johnson, there was an implied compliment in it. "Raillery," says Jonathan Swift, "is the finest part of conversation." Then he goes on to complain that raillery is not merely "repartee, or being smart." He explains:

It now passes for raillery to run a man down in discourse, to put him out of countenance, and make him ridiculous; sometime to expose the defects of his person or understanding; on all which occasions, he is obliged not to be angry, to avoid the imputation of not being able to take a jest. It is admirable to observe one who is dexterous at this art, singling out a weak adversary, getting the laugh on his side, and then carrying all before him.

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