How to make all of your friends laugh at your next meet-up, the Virginia tavern way

The tavern table was built for laughter

Walk into a Williamsburg tavern in 1770 and you would not have found a quiet room. The long table was shared with strangers, the cider came in a jug, and the evening had a shape to it: supper, then toasts, then songs, then stories, then games, then more toasts. A tavern keeper who could not keep a room laughing did not keep a tavern long.

The Society's closing Sunday is built on that shape. It is the sitting people write to us about afterwards, more than the supper, and it is the easiest one to copy at home. What follows is how a harvest gathering of a dozen or two hundred is made to laugh, with the colonial sources where they exist and plain modern advice where they do not. The feeding of it, the oysters and cider and ham, is tallied on the harvest almanac page.

Appoint a toastmaster

The single most useful thing you can do for a gathering is give one person the job of running it. In the eighteenth century this was the toastmaster, and a good one was a prize. The toastmaster does not need to be funny. They need to be willing, loud enough, and sober enough to keep count.

• Open with a toast to the harvest, short and sincere, before anyone has had much cider. It sets the room.
• Call the toasts in rounds. The colonial custom was a round of toasts after supper in which every person at the table gave one, going round the board. "To absent friends." "To the oyster, that gave its all." "To the cook, who did not." The rule is one sentence, standing, glass up.
• Keep a forfeit. Anyone who cannot produce a toast sings a verse of something instead. Nobody has ever failed to produce a toast under this rule.
• Close with the last toast and a signal that the evening is turning to stories. A bell, a knock on the table, a stick of pomace on the fire.

Period toasts survive in abundance and are easily found in the published diaries of the Virginia planters. Many are political and some are rude. The Society's advice is to let the guests write their own, which are always better than anything printed.

The tall-tale competition

Virginia storytelling in the colonial period was competitive, oral and shameless. The tall tale, the story that starts plausible and grows until the room catches on, is the native form. The Society holds a tall-tale competition on the closing Sunday, judged by applause, and it is the loudest half hour of the festival.

1. Set the theme at the start of supper so people have an hour to think. "The largest oyster ever taken from the York." "What the ham said when we cut it." "How the cider press came to be haunted."
2. Three minutes each, by the sand glass. A three-minute glass on the table is theatre, and it keeps the long-winded honest.
3. The tale must begin true. This is the only rule of craft that matters. A tall tale that starts absurd has nowhere to go. One that starts with "my uncle, who kept the ferry at Jamestown" and grows from there will have the table leaning in before the lie begins.
4. Judge by noise, not by vote. The toastmaster holds a hand over each teller in turn and the room makes its feeling known. A vote is slow and polite. Noise is honest.
5. The prize is useless and coveted. The Society's is a wooden oyster knife with the year burned into the handle. Winners have been known to frame it.

After-supper parlour games

Once the table is cleared and the cider is warming on the hearth, the gathering splits naturally into smaller circles, and this is where the games belong. The ones below are colonial or close to it, need nothing but people and a table, and are reliably funny with mixed company of any age.

• Questions and Commands. The commander asks each player a question that must be answered, or gives a command that must be done, or a forfeit is paid. The forfeits were the point. Keep a bowl of them written on slips: "Sing the first verse of a hymn to the tune of a drinking song." "Compliment the person to your left for a full minute."
• The Minister's Cat. Round the circle, each player describes the cat with an adjective beginning with the next letter of the alphabet. "The minister's cat is an amiable cat." "A bilious cat." Hesitation is a forfeit. By Q the room is helpless.
• Blind Man's Buff, which is older than the colony and was played by adults as much as children. Clear the chairs first. A roomful of cider and a blindfold is funny for exactly the reason you would expect.
• Cross-questions and crooked answers. Each player whispers a question to the left and an answer to the right, and the questions and answers are read out mismatched. This is the eighteenth-century ancestor of every game of consequences since.
• The Sailor's Toast, a Society invention: each player must propose a toast to an object on the table. The oyster shell, the cork, the candle stub. The best gets the shell thrown in the fire with ceremony.

Wit at the table: what the sources say

The diaries of the period are full of complaints about dull company and praise for people who could "set the table in a roar". A few rules fall out of them that have not aged:

• Tease the powerful, never the shy. The best eighteenth-century table wit was aimed upward, at the host, the governor, the clergyman at the end of the table. A joke at the expense of the quietest guest killed a room then and does now.
• Let the food be the straight man. A ham that will not carve, a gaper that will not open, a cider that is drier than promised. The table is already laughing at these; the host should laugh first.
• Stories beat jokes. A joke has one laugh in it. A story about the time the oyster boat sank has six, and the teller can make it longer or shorter as the room allows.
• Stop before the room does. The toastmaster's last job is to end the evening while people still want more. The colonial signal was the candles being snuffed. The Society's is the pomace going on the fire for the last toast.

A note on cider and judgement

Everything above works better at the second glass than at the fifth. Dry heritage cider runs about 7% abv, which the colony drank in quantities that would alarm a modern physician, and we are not the colony. Serve water in the same jug as the cider, serve sweet cider alongside the hard, and have the ham and bread on the table from the first toast to the last. The laughter will take care of itself.

To provision a gathering like this, from a dozen at the kitchen table to a hundred on the lawn, the harvest almanac and feast provisioner will tally the oysters, the apples, the ham and the firewood. Bring your own toastmaster.