I WAS THE COMMENCEMENT SPEAKER at my son Freddy’s graduation from high school a few weeks ago. The night before, my daughter Grace informed me she remembered only one thing I’d said three years earlier when I delivered the address at her graduation. That was my advice to look for courses in college that don’t require papers. I didn’t ask if she has taken the advice, but I did feel chagrined that this was all she recalled. Perhaps I should have been flattered that she recalled even this one nugget. That’s one more than I remember from either my high school or college graduation and one more, I’d guess, than most people recall from theirs. Still, it was not encouraging to find out my remarks had been as superfluous as the lyrics in a rock song.
But then again, I hadn’t been chosen to speak at my son’s or my daughter’s graduation because I’m a powerful orator or a great thinker. Perish the thought. Their school, St. Stephen’s and St. Agnes in Alexandria, Virginia, has a wonderful tradition of having commencement speakers who both graduated from the school and have a kid in that year’s class. I suspect I was the only person who qualified this year. They were stuck with me.
There’s one rule for graduation speeches: Be brief. The time limit was 10 minutes, and I intended to honor it. There are also two seat-of-the-pants rules I have for such occasions: Be funny and don’t embarrass yourself or your child who is graduating.
Funny isn’t so hard since you can steal jokes. I’ve been milking one by Mort Zuckerman, publisher of U.S. News & World Report, for years. The occasion was a bachelor party for John McLaughlin, the TV show host, who was getting married for the second time. “John, your words will be remembered long after Shakespeare’s are forgotten,” Zuckerman said. He then added, “But not until then.” The same would be true for my words, I told my son’s graduating class.
Now, funny may be easy, but it’s rare. I had laboriously checked out commencement speeches given by others for comments to pilfer. You’d be surprised how unfunny the vast majority of these addresses are. But not the one I found by Al Franken, the crazy liberal comic. I was leery of using his joke, Franken not being my cup of tea. But my wife Barbara insisted it was very funny. I repeated it in my speech, giving Franken full credit.
“When I was first asked to speak at Hartford State Technical College, I jumped at the opportunity,” Franken said. “Because, you see, I thought I had been asked to speak at Harvard, which would have been quite an honor. But instead, I am here with you, the nation’s future air conditioning repairmen. Let’s try to make the best of it.” It turned out Barbara was right. The crowd was laughing before I reached the punch line.
I cited a few more excerpts from graduation speeches, then told the kids the bad news. Here I seized on political writer Mike Barone’s brilliant insight about Soft America and Hard America. Kids up to 18 are pampered and shielded from the world’s stormy blast by their parents. That’s Soft America. But then they’re parachuted into Hard America, where folks play for keeps. Oddly enough, Barone says, American kids grow up fast after 18 and become amazingly competent.
How much of this speech, you may be wondering, did I actually write myself? The answer is as little as possible.
Of course one also has to give advice in a commencement address. Here I shifted gears and went with some of my own material, most of it counterintuitive. Do sweat the small stuff, I said. Get the little things right and you’ll be asked to do bigger things. And don’t worry about keeping in touch with your friends. That’ll happen naturally. But do pay attention to your friends’ parents, who’ll be able someday to give you internships, jobs, introductions, or letters of recommendation.
None of those got a rise, nor did my theory of college. Go to class, every class, I advised solemnly. And then you can scrape by even if, like many students, you don’t study a lick or read any of the required books. Shamelessly, I swiped another bit of advice from my friend Brit Hume of Fox News. College students should be alert to the four big lies about studying: I’ll get up early and study. I’ll study over the weekend. I’ll do the term paper over vacation. And we’ll study together.
I got an early tipoff that my whole speech was soon to be forgotten, despite my best efforts. A number of students graciously said they liked it, but not one mentioned anything specific. Okay, okay, I shouldn’t have expected anything more. I had, however, passed the first test of giving a good commencement speech. I had finished in 10 minutes.
–Fred Barnes
