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The commencement speech playbook: Make joke, pretend to be humble, impart lesson

Governor Charlie Baker spoke at commencement at UMass Amherst.Hoang “Leon” Nguyen/The Republican via Associated Press/The Republican via AP

Commencement is upon us, that season of tassled caps, extravagant processionals, introductions between your grandmother and the entire extended family of a classmate you haven’t spoken with in years — and, of course, long inspirational speeches.

Or maybe just long.

The genre of the Commencement Speech is fixed and rarely transcended. Such orations must include at least one labored attempt at “making a joke”; one expression of humility for even being invited to speak; one tribute to the enduring value of education, no matter the crushing debt or the declining material value of degrees; and several “didactic little parable-ish stories,” as David Foster Wallace put it in his 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon — which actually did transcend the genre, perhaps, as one critic wrote, by fulfilling it so precisely.

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Boston, home to what feels like an infinite number of graduations, is Ground Zero for this ritual rhetoric, and this year’s speeches at area colleges and universities hit all the notes. Their common themes, echoed by commencement speakers across the country, serve as an important reminder: There’s nothing like graduation day, except for every other graduation day in the history of the world.

1. Why did they choose me to give this speech?

The “why me?” launch serves multiple purposes: First, it establishes a light, self-deprecating tone that you can use to tell the story of your breathtaking success; second, it lowers expectations.

“Last year’s speaker was an Emmy-nominated actor. OK. That’s OK, I thought. Then I kept reading,” said Tara Westover, the best-selling author of the memoir “Educated,” speaking to graduates at Northeastern about Aimée Mullins, 2018’s commencement speaker. Comparing herself with Mullins, Westover apologized: “I, in contrast, am not a model. I’ve overcome no major surgeries, and I’ve developed no technology to help others.”

Isabel Capeloa Gil, the first female president of the International Federation of Catholic Universities, told Boston College that for her to speak at a commencement was “perhaps even a bit outlandish.”

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“The Greeks named this presumed self-importance ‘hubris’ and saw it as a dangerous taunting of the gods with an anticipated tragic outcome,” Gil quipped. “Hopefully, not so today!”

2. No one cares what commencement speakers say.

Commencement speakers took care to remind their audiences (and themselves) that no one has ever remembered what a graduation speaker said.*

Marcia McNutt, president of the National Academy of Sciences, brought this point home in her speech at Boston University, in which she imagined designing a hypothetical survey to quantify how many students would remember what she said. An accurate survey, she said, would reveal that no one remembered anything at all.

“True confessions — I’ve been to three of my own graduations,” Governor Charlie Baker told graduates at UMass Amherst. “I do not remember who spoke at my high school graduation. German Chancellor Helmut Kohl spoke at my college graduation. I do not remember what he said. And General Motors CEO Roger Smith spoke at my business school graduation. I do not remember what he said, either.”

The broadcast journalist Soledad O’Brien, speaking at Emerson, recalled sitting at her own commencement, “waiting for the speaker to get on with it already.”

* The exception to this rule is if a speaker announces that he or she will wipe away the student debt of the graduating class, as the philanthropist Robert F. Smith memorably did at Morehouse College this month.

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3. Don’t post this on Instagram.

Grown-ups are always worried about Kids These Days. This year’s commencement speakers are no exception. They’re urging graduating students to abandon their online lives and their digital nativity, and focus instead on the “real world” (whatever that is).

“Don’t believe IG — Instagram is a pimp,” the Oscar-nominated actress Alfre Woodard, who has starred in TV shows and movies including “Desperate Housewives” and “12 Years a Slave,” told the graduating class at Tufts, adding that many aspects of Instagram were “crazy pants.” She lamented that social media was a “bogus currency,” making students think they must contort themselves both physically and emotionally to stack up.

At Northeastern, Westover agreed. “Here’s something I truly believe: Everything of any significance that you will do in your life will be done by your un-Instagrammable self. It is, for example, your un-Instagrammable self who is graduating today,” she said.

O’Brien, too, urged graduates to turn away from their screens and their cultivated online personas. “If you focus on your amazingly awesome, snarky Twitter account, but not actually getting to know human beings, you probably won’t solve any problems,” she said. “And you definitely will not change the world.”

4. My dad tried to date my mom for years and finally wore her down.

Often, speakers tell cherished family stories featuring male relatives desperately attempting to gain female relatives’ attention, which strike a slightly off-key note in the #MeToo era.

O’Brien told Emerson graduates that when her parents were courting, the man who would become her father drove to church in his car every Sunday, while the woman who would become her mother walked.

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“And my dad would basically hit on my mom,” she said. “Day after day, every single day, he would ask her if she wanted a ride. And she’d say, ‘No thank you.’ And then one day, she said yes.”

The governor recounted a similar love story: His grandmother and his grandfather met on an airfield in France during World War I and soon began writing letters to each other. One day, his grandfather wrote to his grandmother asking her to marry him. “She wrote back and said no,” Baker said. Ah, but eventually she changed her mind, and they lived happily ever after.

5. You were probably drunk yesterday and may still be today.

Many commencement speakers are confident that the majority of students are thoroughly drunk, or at least were yesterday and will be tomorrow. The graduates seem to enjoy this assumption, clapping and cheering to confirm that yes, they indeed love partying.

“I am very much aware that some of you just rolled in from last night. I get it,” O’Brien told Emerson, to laughs.

“Let me get on with imparting some words of wisdom because I know most of you are probably hungover,” Ruth Carter, the Oscar-winning costume designer behind “Black Panther,” said at Suffolk University, adding that “the rest of you can’t wait to get to the mimosas.”

McNutt, the scientist so confident that no one would remember anything she said at Boston University, suggested that perhaps graduates might also forget some of the material they’d learned in college.

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“That day could come as soon as tomorrow, depending on how hard you party tonight!” she said as the crowd broke into applause.

6. Remember . . .

Perhaps the most famous convention — the one that returns to commencement speeches year after year, and is being deployed with vigor in 2019, as well — is the life moral, neatly packaged into a sentence beginning with the word “remember.”

“Remember, as you calculate student loan debt, and maybe even starter home debt, your real debt as a human being is to other human beings,” O’Brien said.

“Remember, our real work in this life is the continual growing into how to love — and how to receive love,” Woodard said. “Remember, never let anybody who is telling the truth stand alone.”

“Remember to stay in touch with your mentors,” Carter said.

“Remember, we are the stories we tell,” Gil said.

“To get trustworthy results requires a lot of extra work,” McNutt said. “Remember that.”


Zoe Greenberg can be reached at zoe.greenberg@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @zoegberg.