- Your audience is tired and drunk. This is not the time to trot out your favorite theorems in differential topology and pontificate about how these theorems unify all natural laws.
- If you have chosen your topic well, the audience (remember, we're all drunk) will want to participate. Expect lots of laughter, inappropriate questions, and good-natured heckling. Your talk should not be more than 30 minutes long (remember, we're all drunk), and should include no more than 10 minutes of material.
- If you have disregarded points 1 and 2, your talk will unfold as follows:
- In the first 5-10 minutes, your audience will initiate the participation phase. Questions and comments will focus on your choice of fonts on your slides, your failure to cite irrelevant work by your friends, and the fact that your socks don't match your tie.
- When you respond too earnestly to these questions and comments, your audience will fall silent. They don't yet believe that you are truly serious and are waiting for the punchline.
- Around 20-30 minutes into your dissertation, your audience now realizes that you have hijacked the banquet and they will begin to rebel. Eating and drinking, having resumed around minute 10 or so, will become quite loud. There will be audible laughter; you must recognize that this laughter is in response to jokes made at your expense. At some tables in the banquet hall, food will be thrown (remember, we're drunk).
- After 50 minutes, your audience will fall silent again. This silence signals defeat and helplessness. The deep sighs you hear should be interpreted as wordless pleas to stop, just stop.
- After your summary and conclusions, your audience will politely applaud. This is because you finally shut up, not because anyone appreciated your insights.
- There will be no questions.
- You will not be invited to any hotel-room parties.
Tuesday, August 05, 2008
In which I extend some words of advice.
If you are ever called upon to give an address at a banquet, here are some pointers that may help make the evening a more enjoyable experience, both for you and for your audience (me).
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9 comments:
This is one of my new favorite posts ever, on any topic.
OMG. Thanks. I recently went to a nightmarish banquet at a Major National Meeting of a Society Division. The banquet speaker spent most of the time squelching technical difficulties with his PowerPoint, featuring lots of video clips of dubious relevance. Somewhere in there might have been an interesting fifteen minutes of material, but it dragged for an hour. People were throwing food by the end, with a minority attempting to shout down the grumblers. And I managed to foul up the initial scrum for table position by allowing myself to be buttonholed by an earnest student for too long. So I was sitting with some really wack people whose native language was Former Yugoslav Republic Dialect. BANQUET FAIL.
A talk at a dinner without humor is dead in the water. Fortunately, I do Indian art, so i get to show a lot of very busty and very scantily-clad women in my talks, and that is always a hit with drunk people.
OMGWTFBBQ! This must be the Conference from Hell. AP, you have my deepest sympathy. Drink up! I hope you're carrying a flask in your handbag...my sister says that's the only way she survives being a bridesmaid in friends' weddings. :-P
THIS is why I hate fucking conferences. HATE. I will do anything to avoid them...unfortunatly, it looks like it will be my turn in the barrel for the APA this year.
@ Dr. Pablito - yes, the table scrum is the most important part of the banquet. I think if I had to sit with, say, Dr. Bane, I would just leave and head to the hotel restaurant.
@ Miss Kitty - this year was particularly bad. (See tomorrow's post.) I hope that it lightens up next year, when I retire from the executive board.
@ Cranky - do you mean the American Psychological Association meeting?
The first mistake is having speakers AFTER a meal. I went to a program by a Director/Head Curator of a major historical site, and (this is TRUE) just before the final comments I woke up...and looking around, discovered that almost all the rest of the house was dozing or sleeping too. Guy didn't seem to notice, but the initial applause woke the the rest, who then applauded enthusiastically.
This is good advice for any presentation. It does not matter if the group is drunk or sober.
I had the joy of teachng a class in architectural history. I had a class that met twice a week for 1.5 horus each time. It was right after lunch, you could see the students slide off their sugar high and fade out.
Aha - so this explains why those addresses are always so thin.
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