Start With a Laugh: An Insider's Guide to Roasts, Toasts, Eulogies, and Other Speeches
by Liz Carpenter with Sondra Williamson Runnells
Eakin Press, 274 pp., $24.95 Liz Carpenter hopes that once you've finished reading her new book and given a speech of your own, you will be able to say that "you've won them over with your good nature, you've dazzled them with your command of the subject at hand, and you've engaged them with your personal perspective." That, at least, is what Carpenter has been up to apparently since the first grade in Salado, when she was asked to recite something pertinent about a country of her own choosing. She chose Japan, and her mother helped her select the facts and mold them into sound bites:
I come from Japan,
A funny little land
Where people wear kimonos in the street.
They have straight black hair
And they never use a chair,
But they sit right down on their feet.
Judging from the wealth of Carpenter's speeches included in Start With a Laugh, she hasn't stopped giving public performances since then, though she's neglected verse for her trademark nervy humor and disarming frankness. At a speech in 1998 about presidential humor, she began by acknowledging that, having covered Washington as a reporter for almost 25 years and then having become a speechwriter and press secretary in the Johnson administration, she is a "political artifact." By admitting that she is no longer in the thick of things, she aligns herself with the audience; she's willing to be the underdog we all want to root for. It makes her revelations about how various presidents have used humor seem all the more revelatory. It's as if she's saying, "The system chewed me up and spit me out, too, but look at what I've taken from it." In 1996, she spoke to the Boston University Department of Communications, and began by saying, "This is a speech about communications, yesterday and today. It is a crazy sort of speech about how it was and how it is." That restless simplicity -- so simple it's complex -- is far removed from the drab, straightforward approach audiences routinely suffer.
And that's what the novice (or even experienced) speechwriter is supposed to glean from Start With a Laugh. The author states in her introduction that she envisions her book ending up on the speechwriter's desk "between Webster and Roget," meaning that she intends it to be a book that can be turned to for easy reference. Chapters with titles like "The Three Basic Ingredients of a Speech," "Humor Is Therapy," "Using Personal Experiences to Connect With the Audience," and "Dedicating a Building or Public Monument" steer the writer who knows what he is looking for in the right direction. Carpenter provides brief introductions to all of the speeches she includes in this book, but the speeches themselves are the emphasis, not analysis by the author of what makes the speeches successful. For that reason, it may be more accurate to call Start With a Laugh a book of anecdotes and an engaging, often hilarious memoir in line with Carpenter's previous works, Ruffles and Flourishes, about her time working at the White House; Unplanned Parenthood: The Confessions of a Seventy-Something Surrogate Mother; and Getting Better All the Time, about aging and being a widow. That said, in the second part of the book (where speechwriters who want their advice straight and fast should turn), the first rule Carpenter lays down is that "to write good speeches, read good speeches." Certainly anyone who wants to write good speeches should read these. And anyone who wants to hear the story of how a lady from Salado, Texas, found herself behind the scenes of Washington politics for a good part of the 20th century, and who was always a little bemused and humbled by that prospect, should turn to these pages as well.
