Humor does not have to be obvious. Sometimes it is most effective when it comes from milking a straight line for laughs.

When I was living in Nashville, during the mid-1970s, noted English actor Anthony Quayle spent a few months at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville as a visiting artist. He starred in UT’s production of Macbeth. I didn’t catch his performance there, but I did see him when he came to Nashville for a one-night only, one-man show at Vanderbilt University.

Since he called his production “Readings from the Elizabethans”, I wasn’t expecting much of a turn out. But I was wrong. The auditorium was packed, and for about 90 minutes, Mr. Quayle absolutely charmed the crowd with his warmth, his modesty, his humor and his obvious love of his material.

As I recall, the “readings” included speeches from Shakespeare and Marlowe, a letter of Sir Walter Ralegh’s, the moving elegy that young Chidiock Tichbourne wrote while awaiting execution for his role in the Babington plot against Queen Elizabeth (“My prime of youth is but a frost of cares…”) and some assorted comments on the theatre from actors and critics of the day.

One of these was a letter that the actor Ned Alleyn wrote to his wife while on tour. In particular, he wants news of how his garden is doing. Quayle said that he loved Alleyn’s letters, “Because they are so much like the letters I write to my own wife when I am away.”

Quayle also quoted a 1583 diatribe against the theatre penned by a Puritan killjoy named Philip Stubbes. According to Stubbes, the real reason why people frequented theatres was to find partners with whom to indulge in debaucheries afterwards. He wrote: “these goodly pageants being ended, every mate sorts to his mate, everyone brings another homeward of their way very friendly, and in their secret conclaves covertly they play the sodomites or worse.”

Quayle used the same line, except that he milked it for an enormous laugh. Assuming a suitably dour Puritan expression he intoned: “and in their secret conclaves covertly they play the sodomites [long pause] or worse.”

“Well!” Quayle exclaimed as he reverted to being himself. “The imagination fairly boggles at that one, doesn’t it?” And the audience roared.

One of the best ways to hold people’s attention is to make them laugh. Speechwriters should always be alert to the possibilities for using humor – even when a line is not obviously funny.

I’m adding a P.S. here to my last post.

While he was playing Macbeth at the University of Tennessee, Anthony Quayle gave an interview to a local paper that has always made me laugh.

When asked if he preferred playing the classics to contemporary works, Quayle admitted that he did. And why was that, the interviewer persisted.

For three reasons, Quayle replied: “They are better-written, they have better parts for actors and (laughing) all the authors are dead.”

In his book, Lincoln at Gettysburg, Garry Wills recounts an intriguing argument that Lincoln had with his young secretary, John Hay, after the two had taken in a performance of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1.

The part of Falstaff had been played by the noted Victorian actor, James Hackett, with whom Lincoln corresponded and occasionally invited to the White House. There is a broadly comic scene in the second act of the play where Falstaff gives a lurid account to Prince Hal and his drinking buddies of how he and a companion were set upon by a large band of robbers and how he heroically defended himself. The humor arises from the fact that Falstaff is unaware that the “robbers” were Prince Hal and one of his friends in disguise, and that they know perfectly well that Falstaff turned tail and ran at the sight of them, even though the odds were equal.

The argument between Lincoln and Hay involved Hackett’s delivery of Falstaff’s line, “These four came all affront, and mainly thrust at me.”

Hackett had emphasized the word “thrust”, whereas Lincoln thought he should have emphasized “me.”

Pedantically, Hay disagreed. In this instance, he argued, “mainly” meant “strongly or fiercely,” so Falstaff is saying that with all their might his assailants thrust at him.

But Lincoln held his ground. He felt the line was funnier if Falstaff had said, “mainly they thrust at me.” In other words, Falstaff is saying, “poor me.” This pretended gang of cutthroats is going after him rather than his companion. This would recall his earlier line, “two or three or fifty upon poor old Jack.”

Hay may have been right, at least in terms of semantics. But Wills points out that when Orson Welles played Falstaff in Chimes at Midnight, his 1965 movie version of Henry IV, Welles read this line Lincoln’s way, not Hay’s. He adds that there was very little that Hay or anyone else could teach Lincoln about milking a line for laughs.

This month marks the 50th anniversary of President Dwight Eisenhower’s decision to send federal troops to Little Rock, Arkansas to enforce court-ordered desegregation of the public schools. To commemorate this historic milestone, Kasey Pipes, who wrote speeches for President George W. Bush and California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, has produced an informative and stirring book called, Ike’s Final Battle.

As Pipes tells the story, Eisenhower is Everyman in a morality play about securing racial justice in America. Born in Texas in 1890, and brought up in Abilene, Kansas, Eisenhower absorbed the prejudices common to Middle Americans of that era. But he also acquired a strong sense of decency, justice and fair play. In short, he combined the light and dark sides of American attitudes on race.

Eisenhower’s views on black Americans were dramatically altered by the courage displayed by his black troops during World War II. Initially, black soldiers were employed mainly as cooks and support personnel. But when the Germans launched a surprise offensive at the Battle of the Bulge, and Ike called for every able-bodied man in the Army, whatever his station, to volunteer to stem the tide, black soldiers surged forward even though they had no combat training. “[S]ome of them would die with a rifle in their hands they’d never fired before,” a deeply moved Ike would later recall. “[They] fought nobly for their country. And I will never forget.”

So Eisenhower came to the presidency resolved to do what he could to secure equal treatment for blacks.

For him, doing what he could meant completing the desegregation of the armed forces begun by Harry Truman and ending segregation in the District of Columbia and throughout federal government. Ike also appointed the first black staffer to the White House.

Naturally, there were many who hoped for more. Martin Luther King, who met face-to-face with Eisenhower on civil rights, said that his personal sincerity was pronounced, but “his conservatism was fixed and rigid, and any evil defacing the nation had to be extracted bit by bit with a tweezer because the surgeon’s knife was and instrument too radical to touch this best of all societies.”

Eisenhower’s approach to civil rights was evolutionary rather than revolutionary. He would lead no charges in public, but what one historian called his “hidden hand” was very much in evidence behind the scenes. He ordered his attorney general, Herbert Brownell, to file an amicus brief in support of the NAACP in the landmark school desegregation case of Brown v. Board of Education. He also played a covert role in ensuring the success of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which was organized by Martin Luther King after the arrest of Rosa Parks. One of King’s lieutenants was brilliant young lawyer named Fred Gray. Appreciating his value to King, the local Montgomery draft board decided to induct Gray into the Army. Eisenhower intervened through the National Selective Service System, which overruled the local board. Later, Eisenhower would send Congress the first civil rights bill since Reconstruction.

But if Eisenhower’s heart was in the right place, why didn’t he use the bully pulpit afforded him by the White House to do more for civil rights? According to speechwriter Pipes, Ike had little faith that speeches could accomplish anything. He once told a staffer that if the American people wanted a wordsmith as president, then “we ought to elect Ernest Hemingway.”

Then, as now, some people regarded his silence as apathy or even hostility toward the legitimate claims of black Americans. But as Pipes points out, if you compare Eisenhower’s stance on racial equality to that of his contemporaries, his stature grows rather than diminishes.

For example, Ike’s predecessor, Harry Truman, told a group of Yale University students around 1960 that he was proud of his civil rights record, “But personally, I don’t care to associate with n*gg*rs.” Adlai Stevenson, Ike’s rival for the White House in 1952, hoped to avoid taking a stand on civil rights during his second presidential bid in 1956 by proposing a one-year “moratorium” on demonstrations and legal action.

Lyndon Johnson, with his own eye on the presidency, supported Ike’s civil rights bill in 1957 while serving as a senator from Texas. But to remain in good graces with white southerners, he cynically undercut the measure by proposing an amendment that would require a trial by jury for anyone accused of a civil rights violation. Since at that time, “trial by jury” in the South meant trial by other white southerners, there was little chance that anyone who violated the law would go to jail. Furthermore, according to Robert Parker, Johnson’s bartender and chauffeur, LBJ was not above shoring up his standing with his racist Southern colleagues by addressing Parker as “n*gg*r,” whenever he took his Dixiecrat pals for rides in his limousine.

John Kennedy, also serving in the Senate at that time, voted for Johnson’s trial by jury amendment, later claiming that if he had not done so, the bill would have been filibustered to death. (When JFK ran for president in 1960, he tried to enlist the support of black baseball immortal, Jackie Robinson. Robinson complained that Kennedy wouldn’t look him in the eye, and ended up endorsing Richard Nixon, who had done more to promote the civil rights bill than Kennedy.)

This was what America was like when Arkansas Governor Orville Faubus attempted to defy the federal courts on integrating Little Rock public schools in September of 1957. Although Eisenhower had previously told reporters that he couldn’t imagine circumstances that would require him to send in federal troops, he did not hesitate to do so when all other means of persuasion failed. He would say later that his decision to do so ranked with D-Day as the toughest of his life.

John Kennedy would criticize Eisenhower for allowing the crisis in Little Rock to escalate to the point that federal troops were necessary. Yet five years later, when Kennedy faced his own confrontation with a racist governor over the integration of the University of Mississippi, he waited until 375 people had been wounded and two killed before sending in federal troops. In contrast, no one had died at Little Rock, and no one was seriously injured.

“In the final analysis,” concludes Kasey Pipes in the final pages of this remarkable book, “Eisenhower’s last, longest, and perhaps greatest battle was ultimately a struggle within himself. He had to overcome his own background and his own doubts. In the end, like every battle he ever waged, he fought it with his heart, mind, and soul. And like every battle he ever waged, in the end, he won.”

The EU bureaucrats in Brussels decided last week that discretion was the better part of valor and allowed the United Kingdom and Ireland to continue using imperial weights and measures. The bureaucrats had intended to make the metric system exclusive by 2010, but realized that if they messed with beer by the pint, they risked a popular uprising throughout the British Isles.

Chalk one up for a character that G.K. Chesterton called the rolling English drunkard, in his poem, “The Rolling English Road”:

Before the Roman came to Rye or out to Severn strode,
The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road.
A reeling road, a rolling road, that rambles round the shire,
And after him the parson ran, the sexton and the squire;
A merry road, a mazy road, and such as we did tread
The night we went to Birmingham by way of Beachy Head.

The rolling English road symbolizes all the little peculiarities that make England, England – and woe betide any foreigner who tries to interfere:

I knew no harm of Bonaparte and plenty of the Squire,
And for to fight the Frenchman I did not much desire;
But I did bash their baggonets because they came arrayed
To straighten out the crooked road an English drunkard made,
Where you and I went down the lane with ale-mugs in our hands,
The night we went to Glastonbury by way of Goodwin Sands.

Bonaparte went down to defeat before the Duke of Wellington, and the Brussels bureaucrats beat a hasty retreat before good stout men with ale-mugs in their hands. So beer by the pint is safe, for the time being, at least, and the rolling English road will meander on. And that’s something to celebrate. For, as Chesterton reminds us:

There is good news yet to hear and fine things to be seen,
Before we go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green.

On one occasion during my stint in the Reagan White House, I found myself in the West Wing, watching the State of the Union message on TV with the rest of the domestic policy staff. As President Reagan delivered the speech, the staffers’ heads began to nod, one by one, like those little spring-necked dolls you sometimes see in curio shops: “That’s my sentence,” said one. “That’s my sentence,” said another. “Whoops!” someone else interjected. “He ad-libbed that last line.” And so it went, issue after issue, policy statement after policy statement.

That is what writing for the president or for any other major political figure is like. The speeches are group projects from beginning to end. Speechwriters not only have to share credit with their colleagues, but also with the policy experts and political advisors who provide much of the raw material at the beginning of the process and review the final drafts at the end. Even then, and even if he has already contributed heavily to the drafting, the speaker himself very often tweaks the speech right up to the moment he gives it.

Because so many very smart people are involved in the process, it is more than a little obnoxious when one member of the team tries to hog all the credit. But it happens. Peggy Noonan was one particularly egregious example of this self-aggrandizement and Mike Gerson, apparently, is another. At least that’s the story that Matthew Scully, Gerson’s White House colleague, tells in the current issue of the Atlantic.

Scully looked at the first chapter of Gerson’s forthcoming book, Heroic Conservatism, and couldn’t contain his indignation over Gerson’s grandstanding any longer. As he writes in the Atlantic: “Without fear of contradiction -– because it’s all in the presidential records -– I can report here that Michael Gerson never wrote a single speech by himself for President Bush. From beginning to end, every notable speech, and a huge proportion of the rest, was written by a team of speechwriters, working in the same office and on the same computer. Few lines of note were written by Mike, and none at all that come to mind from the post-9/11 addresses –- not even ‘axis of evil’”

So how was it that Bob Woodward and other major Washington journalists credited Gerson with writing “all of Bush’s memorable post-9/11 speeches”? Simple: Gerson told them.

For example, stories of Gerson writing Bush’s speeches in longhand on yellow legal pads at a nearby Starbucks were all part of the myth that Gerson created for himself. Thus, when Gerson, Scully and John McConnell, the third member of the presidential speechwriting team, were working on a State of the Union address in the White House, Gerson suddenly excused himself to go to an unspecified appointment. Only later did his colleagues learn that while they were slaving away anonymously back at the office, Gerson was at a local Starbucks with a legal pad pretending to craft the whole speech himself for the benefit of a reporter.

“Mike’s conduct,” says Scully, “is just the most familiar and depressing of Washington stories –- a history of self-seeking and media manipulation that is only more distasteful for being cast in such lofty terms.”

The story is both familiar and depressing but, having been there myself, I can understand how it happens. During my own days in the granite wedding-cake building next to the White House –- where many members of the president’s staff are quartered –- ensconced in a 19th Century office with French windows, a balcony and a marble fireplace, I would often muse about writing a book of my own about my experiences. I even had a title in mind. I would call it Following the Trumpets. And I never wrote for President Reagan on a regular basis -- just occasionally. Most of the speeches I wrote were for top advisors, like Ed Meese and budget director Jim Miller.

I’m glad that my innate laziness –- I won’t say it was modesty -– kept me from making such a fool of myself. I can only hope that Mike Gerson won’t one day regret writing Heroic Conservatism.

At one of the Ragan speechwriter conferences some years ago, a neophyte speechwriter asked, “When does it stop being your speech?” In other words, when do the edits and revisions made by others reach the point that the speechwriter can no longer claim authorship?

To which I replied, rather too sharply, I’m afraid, “When is it ever ‘your’ speech?” The speech belongs to the speaker, and speechwriters belong in the background.

Matthew Scully’s article in the current issue of the Atlantic, which I cited in my last post, also contains a rather endearing glimpse of President Bush trying to laugh his speechwriters out of their self-importance.

According to Mr. Scully, when the speechwriting team presented him with a draft that was particularly overwrought, Mr. Bush responded by reading it aloud with “the exaggerated solemnity of Edward Everett Hale or some other 19th-century orator, to laughter all around.”

I think Mr. Scully meant to say Edward Everett, rather than Edward Everett Hale. The latter was a Unitarian clergyman, best remembered as the author of the short story, “The Man Without a Country.” The former was one of America’s leading orators; the man who gave the “official” Gettysburg address in 1863.

It is often forgotten that Edward Everett was the principal speaker at the dedication of the Gettysburg cemetery. President Lincoln had been invited to deliver just “a few appropriate remarks” after Everett had finished.

The people were expecting a major address from Everett, and they got one. He spoke for two hours.

It is my opinion that fledgling speechwriters should be required to read the whole of Everett’s speech –- and then read Lincoln’s, even if they’re already familiar with it. Such an exercise would teach them more about effective speechwriting than any book or seminar. At the very least, it would teach them to curb their literary pretensions before they made themselves ridiculous.

On second thought, maybe reading the whole of Everett’s address is unnecessary; it may even count as cruel and unusual punishment. But at the very least, they should read the first paragraph:

Standing beneath this serene sky, overlooking these broad fields now reposing from the labors of the waning year, the mighty Alleghenies dimly towering before us, the graves of our poor brethren beneath our feet, it is with hesitation that I raise my poor voice to break the eloquent silence of God and Nature. But the duty to which you have called me must be performed; grant me, I pray you, your indulgence and your sympathy.

Had enough?

Everett was a brilliant and cultivated man –- he was, in fact, the first American to receive a Ph.D. degree. He served as president of Harvard, minister plenipotentiary to Great Britain, governor of Massachusetts, and secretary of state under President Millard Fillmore. He was an old man, full of years and honors, when he spoke at Gettysburg.

Lincoln’s “few appropriate remarks” eclipsed his own exhaustive oration, and he knew it. Yet he was gracious enough to write to the president the day after, "I should be glad, if I could flatter myself that I came as near the central idea of the occasion in two hours, as you did in two minutes."

And Lincoln was gracious enough to reply: “In our respective parts yesterday, you could not have been excused to make a short address, nor I a long one. I am pleased to know that, in your judgment, the little I did say was not entirely a failure.”

It was an age of propriety, and Everett and Lincoln were both gentlemen. Still, their modesty and courtesy towards each other is a refreshing contrast to the unseemly squabble currently raging among President Bush’s speechwriters over who deserves credit for writing what. Mr. Bush should have chided them for their pomposity more often.

It took a few episodes, but I’ve become hooked on Mad Men, the current TV series on the careers and private lives of hotshot advertising executives in the year 1960. It’s a series devoted to exploring the dark underside of the world of Ozzie and Harriet, and it succeeds brilliantly in its object.

Although I lived through that period, I still find myself amazed to recall that there was a time, and not so very long ago, when women stayed at home and baked cookies, when office suites were the exclusive preserve of privileged white males, where non-whites were largely invisible and where if a man was unfortunate enough to be gay, he would sooner be torn to pieces than admit it.

Watching the series, I found myself wondering what young people must make of such a world. Social differences aside, it was also a world where being high tech meant having an electric typewriter.

Mad Men skims the surface of American life before the social revolutions of the 1960s and 70s. But for an exhaustive – and I mean exhaustive -- look at how much has changed over the past 40 years, I recommend a book by Leonard Steinhorn, professor of communications at American University. The book is The Greater Generation: In Defense of the Baby Boom Legacy (St. Martin's Press, $24.95).

I had the privilege –- and great pleasure -– of studying under Professor Steinhorn when I earned my master’s degree at American University a dozen years ago. He’s certainly one of the smartest and most decent individuals I’ve ever met.

He’s also a very thorough scholar. If you want to delve into the minutiae of how public attitudes have changed since the immediate post-World War II era, Professor Steinhorn has it all there for you, chapter and verse. In 1958, for example, the Gallup Poll reported that 94 percent of white people disapproved of marriages between whites and non-whites. A 1954 poll found that only 12 percent of Americans would allow an atheist to teach in a college or university, and 60 percent said they wouldn’t allow anyone to publicly attack religion. A 1957 study by the University of Michigan found that 80 percent of adults agreed that a woman must be sick, neurotic or immoral to remain unmarried. As for gays, even the liberal New York Times routinely referred to homosexuals as “perverts” back then.

Professor Steinhorn attributes the sea change in American attitudes between then and now to the impact of the Baby Boom generation, and it’s difficult to argue with his tsunami of statistics. Still, I have a hard time acknowledging the Baby Boomers as the “greater” generation, even though I belong to it.

I would have preferred a little more balance in Professor Steinhorn’s treatment of his subject. He makes much of the “tolerance” of the Boomers, and credits them with “asking the right questions.” I was a college student in the late 1960s, and remember vividly how student protesters shouted down speakers they disagreed with, threatened administrators with “non-negotiable” demands and then shut down the campuses by “striking” –- thus foreclosing rational discourse altogether.

Still, I have to admit that I’d rather be living in the America of today than the America than the America I see on Thursday nights when I watch Mad Men -- and social changes of such magnitude don’t come without conflict. Historians will be arguing over the significance of the Baby Boom generation for decades –- even centuries -– to come. Professor Steinhorn has made an early and valuable contribution to the debate.