"When I give a lecture, I accept that people look at their watches, but what I do not tolerate is when they look at it and raise it to their ear to find out if it stopped"
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A lecture hall has always been a small democracy: the speaker petitions for attention, the audience votes with its body language. Achard, a playwright who understood timing the way surgeons understand blood, nails the most humiliating kind of heckle not with outrage but with stagecraft. He grants the mild insult as a baseline concession: of course people check the time. That admission disarms the crowd and makes him sound reasonable, even worldly. Then he tightens the screw. The offense isnt impatience; its disbelief.
Raising the watch to your ear is a devastating gesture because it turns boredom into evidence. Youre not just waiting for the lecture to end, youre diagnosing it as so inert it might have killed the clock. The subtext is theatrical: the audience becomes an actor in a rival scene, performing your failure while you stand there trying to perform your competence. Achard makes the hecklers funny, which is also how he regains control. Laughter reasserts hierarchy; if the room laughs with him, the speaker is back in command.
The line also shows a playwrights sensitivity to mechanical time versus lived time. A good performance makes minutes disappear; a bad one makes even machinery seem unreliable. In mid-century French theater culture, where wit and tempo were currency, Achard is defending not ego but craft: if youre going to be bored, at least dont advertise that my rhythm is so dead youre checking for a pulse.
Raising the watch to your ear is a devastating gesture because it turns boredom into evidence. Youre not just waiting for the lecture to end, youre diagnosing it as so inert it might have killed the clock. The subtext is theatrical: the audience becomes an actor in a rival scene, performing your failure while you stand there trying to perform your competence. Achard makes the hecklers funny, which is also how he regains control. Laughter reasserts hierarchy; if the room laughs with him, the speaker is back in command.
The line also shows a playwrights sensitivity to mechanical time versus lived time. A good performance makes minutes disappear; a bad one makes even machinery seem unreliable. In mid-century French theater culture, where wit and tempo were currency, Achard is defending not ego but craft: if youre going to be bored, at least dont advertise that my rhythm is so dead youre checking for a pulse.
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| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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