Rhetoric Dept Grad Speech -- the Joke

I love to share this story with rhetoricians.

I graduated with honors in Rhetoric in 1993 from the University of California, Berkeley, and won the competition to be the opening speaker at graduation. The competition consisted of delivering our (5 minute) speeches to the department chair and some faculty members.

When the Chair told me I had won, he also told me I would have to delete a joke from the speech I had written. Censorship at Berkeley? Amazing.

I was given a choice: tell the joke and lose my honors status or not.

Here's the joke:

"Because there's no 'pre-law' major at Berkeley, many future lawyers here study Rhetoric. It is a rare opportunity for those of us who do not intend to become lawyers to observe the lawyer in its larval stage, before it pupates as a pupil at law school and emerges as a full-fledged, adult, blood-sucking parasite."

The Chair said, "The PARENTS of those future lawyers will be in the audience." I replied, "They'll understand that something is either actionable or not. They may even like it. It will roll off them like water from a duck's back." At that point the Chair reiterated his "don't tell it or else" position.

So I didn't tell it.

BTW, in the tradition of oral presentation, the department gives each graduating student the opportunity to give a 30-second statement when his or her name is called. It's a lot of fun to watch.