Vol. 154: A lesson from the Swiss

Not to mention Henny Youngman

Early in my journalistic career, I made a useful discovery: Most people want to talk, but few want to listen. So, if you’re the exception who is willing to listen, people will tell you their deepest, darkest secrets, even if they know you’re a journalist (or even if they’re on national TV, for that matter).

The value of listening was first impressed upon me in 1966 when I observed, up close, a performance by the standup comedian Henny Youngman at a beer distributors’ convention in French Lick, Indiana. Until that night, I had dismissed Youngman as something of a jerk, a purveyor of pointless one-line jokes. But that evening, watching him live for the first time, I noticed that Youngman wasn’t merely telling jokes: He was using each joke to listen to his audience and assess their tastes. If a slightly risqué joke was greeted enthusiastically, he would follow it with a slightly more risqué joke. If not, he moved in another direction— perhaps to a slightly Jewish joke.

And so this process of listening and responding continued throughout his performance. The man was working, and the nature of his work was listening.

This is hardly a new idea. In Ernst Lubitsch’s 1940 film, The Shop Around the Corner, the store manager Kralik (James Stewart) is asked what he contributed to a dinner party. “I just kept still and tried to learn something,” he replies.

Laura Loomer’s nightmare

It’s a valuable notion as we head into a new year. When I grew up in the years after World War II, the First Amendment enabled any idiot with a fortune and a printing press to start a newspaper, and any high school dropout could find a job there. Today, thanks to the Internet, even the printing press and the fortune are unnecessary. But the other side of that coin is: Free speech on the Internet also affords us the opportunity to tell who’s an idiot.

Today the Internet abounds in “influencers” like, say, the Trump worshipper Laura Loomer or the Hitler worshipper Candace Owens, who seem to lack any qualifications other than their ability to seize new media, such as long-form podcasts, webcasts, and vertical video platforms like TikTok– about all of which I, for one, am clueless.

A recent TikTok video that Owens posted after her meeting with Erika Kirk (Charlie’s widow) was viewed more than 14 million times. By contrast, this column that you are reading now circulates among 1,200 colleagues, friends, and relatives, many of them relatively sane.

Like the Marines, I’m just looking for a few good men. Unlike the Marines, I’m also looking for a few good women, children, transgenders, hermaphrodites, whatever. Not for military maneuvers, but for dialogue.

That strategy spares me Laura Loomer’s nightmare: “Sometimes,” she once wrote, “I worry that I will be alone forever as a result of being digitally erased in a world where all aspects of life seem to take place online.”

Life is short. Better to listen quickly to such fallible sources of information, identify them as such, and move on with our lives.

Clarence Thomas and the Russians

To be sure, communication is a two-way street. People who keep their thoughts to themselves are as much to blame for the world’s dysfunctions as people who won’t shut up. I’m thinking here of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who has literally gone years at a stretch without asking a question from the bench. He thus deprives lawyers appearing before him of the opportunity to respond to his thoughts. He also, of course, deprives himself of the ability to keep his blade sharp by testing his ideas.

Sometimes whole countries can be seized by a tradition of silence. On my only visit to the Soviet Union, in 1976, I concluded that Communism was the least of the Russians’ problems. Their real challenge, it seemed to me, was an authoritarian mindset by which most Russians instinctively deferred to authorities to tell them what to think or do.

Or consider Swiss men, who are said to share a bizarre characteristic: They don’t speak unless it’s absolutely necessary. No small talk, no idle chatter, no banter (“How about those Eagles?”) ever crosses their lips. This I have on good authority from the Swiss branch of my own family. My Swiss cousins even shared a popular joke on the subject:

A Swiss couple has a baby boy who makes no sound from the moment he’s born. He doesn’t cry, fuss, or wheeze. When it’s time for him to start talking, he says nothing. At age five, he goes off to school, still without having uttered a word. His parents logically conclude that that their silent son must be a mute.

But one night at dinner, when he’s seven years old, he remarks, “There’s no salt on the table.”

“Oh, my God!” his parents shriek. “You can talk!”

“Of course I can talk,” the boy says.

“Well,” his parents ask, “why didn’t you say anything until now?”

“There wasn’t any reason to,” their son replies.

Happy new year. And in the next 12 months may you discover the happy medium between talking and listening.

Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s new memoir, The Education of a Journalist: My Seventy Years on the Frontiers of Free Speech. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com