Book Review: “Do You Talk Funny?” by David Nihill 4/5
I am with friends at a pub quiz. One of the questions is: what is the height of an emperor penguin? We have to guess within a margin of 10 centimetres.
I like animals and I often visited the zoo in my hometown as a kid. There was a sculpture of the penguin made from stone and covered with glass mosaic - it always felt enormous to me.
I propose a height of 1.8 metres as the answer, with confidence that it might be even higher but a 10 centimetre margin covers it. After all, an emperor sounds huge, right? My friends are not convinced but I’m fighting for it with all my heart. They say that penguins can’t be as tall as humans but I’m so convinced that eventually they believe me and it stays.
Emperor penguins are the tallest and the heaviest penguins on our planet. But they are not that tall, they are roughly around 110 centimetres high. I was wrong. After this pub quiz, whenever I see an image of an unrealistically large penguin in a commercial or on an ice cream stand I take photos and send them to my friends. Imagine these enormous flightless birds going for a walk in the city hand in wing with its residents.
Penguins remind me that when we are kids the world around us is not designed for us. Everything is far too big. We need to have a reference point and the book “Do You Talk Funny?” taught me to use stories, not just whilst talking, but also writing.
The book is highly practical with a serious dose of humour that helps us to remember and is key to making a memorable public speech. The author went all the way to become a standup comedian solely to deal with stage fright, and he shares all his findings from this journey. On the back cover, the last testimonial (written by his mother) says that when he was six years old he drew a penguin drinking beer in a Chinese restaurant, so the potential for him to become a comedian was always there. I wonder how tall the penguin was.