Accustomed as I am to public gaffes

A week for banquets, two in as many nights, requiring frantic relaundering of my only dress shirt. Does anybody have more than one? Other than waiters, toastmasters and Anglo American chairmen?

Speaking of toastmasters, there was a good Master of Ceremonies at the first do. The head of the group throwing this particular bunfight was from the Free State so the MC had a ready tale about Free Staters. Similarly, he was able to identity in light vein with the guest speaker, who was from Washington; and finished by telling an ethnic joke involving the co-sponsor.

It was a decided improvement on the average black-tie evening, with overworked and often unrelated anecdotes.

In the matter of after-dinner speaking, we follow the Americans. We believe for a speech to be acceptable it must be started – and often ended – with a funny story.

Mr Jones, whose field is making conduits for waste products, will begin by saying that drains always remind him of the story of Pat and Mike who become marooned on a desert island and encounter a passing mermaid.

The polite laughter that greets this totally irrelevant piece of fiction then encourages Mr Jones to embark on his speech, proper, which invariably will begin with “I shall not take up much of your time tonight” and end, 50 minutes later, with “but I have taken up too much of your time already”.

British speakers, good British speakers, seldom feel the need to tell funny stories. Bad ones trot out the old chestnut about the Christian in the Colosseum who talks a succession of lions out of having him for dinner. (“I merely told them they’d have to make a speech afterwards.”) But the aim in public-speaking in Britain is to entertain one’s audience by quality of language and delivery, rather than cloak-room narratives.

Personally, I tend to follow the British. On occasions when I am dragged, kicking and screaming, to a podium, I seldom attempt to tell jokes. That may take aback people who expect I might, as the writer of an allegedly humorous column.

Not that I do much to entertain by language and delivery. But experience has taught me that as a raconteur of funny stories, I should have stood in bed.

It happens even when I try to tell a story in the pub. Either I am bound to get the punchline wrong or else, more usually, I find I am interrupted before I can even get that far. People have an uncanny knack for upstaging me that way.

What occurred in the club the other day is typical. I was telling the rest of the group a story about a man on a train who reads page one and two of his newspaper, then crumples it up and throws it out of the window. He does the same with pages three and four and the rest of the paper, crumpling up every page and throwing them out of the window.

A woman sitting opposite says, “Excuse me, why did you do that?”

“Do what?” says the man.

“You tore up your newspaper and threw the pages out of the window.”

“Well,” says the man, “it keeps the tigers away.”

At that point, the member who had won the previous night’s weekly draw walked in. Immediately, attention was shifted in that direction and the clamour grew for him to buy a round. In the melee, I was forgotten.

By everyone but Dick. Courteous to a fault, is old Dick.

“Sorry, John,” he said. “You were telling us . . .”

“Yes,” I said. “So then the woman says, “’But there are no tigers around here!”

“’That’s right,’” says the man. “’Very effective, isn’t it?’”

Dick looked pensively into his glass. “I see,” he said. “H’mm.”

My wife told me a story some weeks ago, which she’d heard from someone in her department, about a family of worms – a mother worm, father worm and little worm – who, for a reason undisclosed, were obliged to cross a motorway.

When they got safely to the other side, the little worm exclaimed, “And now there are four of us.”

Why, my wife wanted to know from me, was that little worm’s arithmetic awry?  I couldn’t tell her. “Because,” she said with an air of triumph, “little worms can’t count.”

The story bothered me. To an extent that it kept me awake a good deal of that night.

I woke my wife too. “That worms story of yours,” I said. “You sure you got the punchline right?”

“Of course,” she said. “Go to sleep.”

I couldn’t leave it there. Somewhere, I felt, the story had become adulterated, had come to lose something vital in translation. No one could have thought up a joke so outstandingly unfunny.

I examined the components. The worms; one small, two large. The motorway. Why a motorway? Now there are four of us, the little worm had said. Any significance in the number four? Why should they be worms anyway?

And then, suddenly, it came to me. Of course! They weren’t worms at all. They were snakes. Mother snake, father snake and little snake. And the little snake had got his arithmetic all wrong  – because he was no adder!

    I decided to wait until morning to tell my wife. “Nonsense!” she said. “They were worms. I heard that part quite clearly.”

A woman at the next table on the first night told the worms version, and her companions fell about laughing.

I decided not to put them right. If there’s anything worse in company than a mis-told joke, it’s the wise guy you tells you it is.

Time Wounds All Heels column