The group of friends who have witty discussions outdoing each other in repartee is one of the things I thought only existed in scripted entertainment. I do hear it on comedy podcasts but those people are performing for the listeners, right? Maybe not.
Like the unpleasant competition kind? Maybe it is a figment. But the women in the podcast (who are entertainment-industry-adjacent, in that magazine-style-writing area) sure knew what she meant.
Speaking of pods and repartee, you people might like this one.
Re: 1-3, someday, Atossa might say "OK boomer," to me. I'd laugh and try to spend the next 2 minutes explaining to her that Baby Boomers are grandpa's and grandma's age and not mine, but she'd cut me off 10 seconds in. Maybe the phrase will be outmoded before she's old enough to pick it up, though. She's precocious in many ways but maybe not that much, and doesn't interact with older kids much except at school.
I'm definitely worse at banter here than a lot of people. I think I can hold my own in person when I try, but I rarely do. Not counting at work or at home with just Cassandane, I can only think of one time in the past six months when I was hanging out with adults and not also trying to supervise Atossa, and I was the life of the party until I had to leave early. I made a New Year's resolution to get out more.
innocent banter through a lens of competition
This absolutely. I have a friend who tends to name-dropping. I don't mind since it's intermittent and she has lots of positive aspects, but there are other people who don't care for it. My dad's conversational style is offputting in a similar way-- he tends to assume that other people share his background, and will launch into details about a beloved topic without asking whether the other person is familiar with bromeliads or Dostoyevsky.
I think of banter (or indeed much conversation) as a verbal instantiation of an Insta feed. IMO Goffman is good on this, Forms of Talk
Boy, when I hear a middle-aged woman say she's generally just as sharp as ever but she's less successfully witty, my explanation is not that her ability to wisecrack is diminished, but that her interlocutors are less willing to give her credit for having made a joke.
E.g., for something fresh in my mind, an incident yesterday where the court reporter at a deposition brought up something funny I said at an earlier deposition. Opposing counsel jumped in to (incorrectly) assert that the male witness had said it.
I am clearly not going to be very successful getting laughs out of that guy, but I wouldn't say it's because my comic timing has deteriorated.
People think I'm making jokes even when I'm just wrong or confused. It helps.
10: there is almost nothing that pushes my buttons more than that. Omg.
"I'll have you know, my wittiness is a matter of public record."
Was the first person to make the joke that "Baker v Carr" was about hotboxing that damaged a rental car.
LB I'm so sorry, that is incredibly maddening.
I have the reverse but I can't help wondering whether it's because I am actually getting funnier or because people are now more afraid than they used to be to tell me that my jokes are crap.
In context, not so bad. Opposing counsel is a Joe-Biden-looking blowhard who's already kind of maxed out how annoyed I can be with one human being. I don't need to amuse him, I just need to make his clients pay to clean up the groundwater they dumped solvents into.
And the court reporter thinks I'm funny, which is more important.
And the court reporter thinks I'm funny, which is more important.
Never underestimate the power of the person who keeps the minutes. There is a reason why so many of the most powerful people in the world have "secretary" in their titles.
Do they still have funny keypads or did computers finally reach them?
I am now remembering fucking with my old boss when he was being difficult. He wisecracked all the time, and keeping a straight face and failing to notice a joke rather than giggling politely at it drove him batshit -- he'd get all distracted and lose his train of thought, and fairly quickly give up on the conversation and leave.
I only pulled that a couple of times, when I was really unable to deal with his shit anymore, and it does feel about as aggressive as smacking someone in the face -- the social expectation that you will laugh politely at an older man's attempted joke is really very very strong.
Oh, being charming to the court reporter is both a good thing in itself and professionally important. The difference between a transcript that cleans up your ums and ers and false-starts and one that's hyperliteral about every noise that comes out of your mouth is huge, and if you give the court reporter reason to dislike you, you may get the second rather than the first.
21: It's all computerized, but still with the funny chorded keypads.
22.last: Also the expectation that nobody will really care about solvents in the groundwater.
20. Stalin was party secretary. It's not who votes or even counts the votes, it's who sends out the meeting invites.
When I hear "repartee" I think "Algonquin Round Table," which some killjoy once claimed was mostly just a bunch of drunks muttering at each other. The good jokes were "esprit d'escalier" afterthoughts.
Though IIRC BC is hellbent (federalism!) on stopping the Rocky Mountain pipeline so I don't see why they'd be fine with coal.
26: Oh, sinkholes and Florida go together like rama-lama-ding-dong.
Nebraska tried and failed to stop the pipeline with crude oil from Canada. They voted for the people who pushed it through, but at least they got it moved so that it isn't near my mom's land.
I didn't know Ma Hick was so important.