Time & Perspective Quote by James Thurber

Banquet speaking, in Thurber's hands, becomes a slow-acting contagion: not a one-night nuisance, but an affliction with a neat incubation period. The joke lands because it treats a bland civic ritual like a high-risk occupation, as if repeated exposure to rubber-chicken applause and canned anecdotes erodes the mind the way trench warfare erodes a body. “Two and a half months” is the killer detail - absurdly specific, pseudo-medical, the kind of number a confident charlatan would cite to make nonsense sound empirical. Thurber isn’t just mocking speakers; he’s mocking the social machinery that keeps inviting them, rewarding the same recycled charm until it curdles into compulsion.

The subtext is about performance as self-loss. The “average banquet speaker” is a type: the local luminary, the corporate glad-hander, the professional anecdote dispenser. He’s not evil, just overfed on attention. Thurber implies that constant public geniality requires a low-grade dishonesty, and that dishonesty has a psychic cost. When the speaker starts “to mutter to himself,” the mask has fused to the face; when he “calls out in his sleep,” the room never clears, the audience never leaves, the act keeps running even offstage.

Context matters: Thurber wrote in an era thick with civic clubs, toastmasters, and mid-century booster culture, where public speaking was both social currency and mild coercion. The line skewers American self-importance with a comedian’s scalpel: the real madness isn’t breakdown, it’s the insistence that every dinner needs a sermon.