| By :
Dirik Hameed
Formal dinners are popular social occasions where invited guests have the opportunity to engage with the peers conversationally. Urbanity, sophistication and social acceptability are all high on the intellectual menu and probably more important to guests than the gastronomic pleasures. In this scenario the after dinner speaker becomes a very important personage in the evening. Invited after dinner speakers are most effective if they encourage the mood of relaxation and enable guests to digest their dinner with a few chuckles. Every orator should understand his function well. It may be to inspire, persuade or console. After dining the function is first and foremost to entertain, though some light hearted instruction might be acceptable under certain circumstances. A sporting or social celebrity often comes to mind as an appropriate guest of honor. However, hosts need to be cautious. A successful sports person who can utter a few closed lipped banalities into a microphone after a match is not necessarily capable of a thirty minute urbane and witty speech. Rather than risk general embarrassment a host might first ascertain tactfully from those in the know how skilled a famous sports person may be as a speaker. Diners will not be impressed by a fumbling performance that will have them shifting uncomfortably in their seats. Celebrity status comes to most people at least once in a lifetime, even if very briefly in most cases. Even a small promotion within an organization can lead to an invitation to speak at a farewell dinner but a newly promoted person may not have any experience or expertise. He could be at risk of making a fool of himself at the outset of a new career phase. Some people are born raconteurs. Without any training they can instinctively tell a joke with perfect timing and nuance so that an audience will fall about in laughter. Another person without those inherited aptitudes may tell exactly the same joke, downloaded word for word from the Internet and be met only by blank stares and polite murmurs. Nevertheless anyone who becomes famous, if only briefly, may be invited to speak at least once. There are few simple rules of thumb that may help anyone in such a dilemma. In preparation one should think of a few simple but serious points that need to be made. Then, even if every joke, witticism and sally falls flat, at least the speech may be ended with some semblance of purpose. It should be remembered that an after dinner speaker usually has a receptive audience ready to laugh when given a cue. The difficult part is the delivery. This is when talent will tell, but for those without aptitude there are some tried and trusted techniques that work consistently. Hyperbole, incongruity, understatement, irony, climax and anti-climax may all be carefully planned, applied like cosmetics to serious points, and delivered with a dead pan expression. The chances are that the speech will be interrupted with howls of laughter and followed by many more invitations to be an after dinner speaker.
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