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By Ed Goldman

Of all the personal qualities we’ve lost along the way, false modesty may be the least lamented but most useful. 

I’m sure you know whereof I speak. Or as we used to say on the east coast, “Capeesh?”, “Farshtey?” or “Ya follow?”, which are, respectively, Italian, Yiddish and what Robert Shaw as Doyle Lonnegan says to his thugs in “The Sting,” usually while they’re watching him eat.

The latter is a gangster trope I’ve discussed before: displaying your power by dining in front of your underlings. It’s not as nauseating as the late President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s holding meetings in the Oval Office while he sat on his Oval Toilet and shouted out his thoughts to members of his Cabinet. In fact, it doesn’t even come close. But, like you, I’m a history buff. I digress…

False modesty is a little worse than saying “Basically, I’m shy” when basically, you’re not.  On the Insincerity Scale I maintain in my (truly modest) office, it’s right up there with “My God, you’ve got to give me the recipe for this meatloaf!” and “I’ll pray for your pet iguana’s full recovery.”

False modesty and claims of shyness are especially popular with actors and politicians, a notable exception being Donald Trump. While he’s insincere only when his lips are moving, he’s never been modest, falsely or otherwise. I’m sure the words “Thanks. I try,” considered the apex of modest replies to flattery, are as alien to him as “Hey, what about you? How are you doing?”

A comical extension of that can occur during an interview when the person I’m chatting with suddenly says, “Oh, listen to me run on. I haven’t asked you anything about yourself.” This happened decades ago when I interviewed Jane Fonda. When she said some variation of the previous remark I started to laugh, as if to say, “Oh, I’m suuuuure you want to know allll about me.” She picked up on that—love her or not, she’s whip-smart—and said, “Well, that was somewhat disingenuous of me, wasn’t it?” Then we both laughed and the interview, which was alllll about her, proceeded. 

I should mention that when something like that happens, I immediately reassure interviewees that the very point of our getting together is to have them talk about themselves, not about me. With some people, I even suggest that for the next 90 minutes or so their job will be to talk about their life and work; when I put it that way, they relax a bit—or as much as people can relax when the guy they’re yakking with is jotting down almost everything they say.

One of my favorite lines about false modesty comes from Alan Bennett, the 90-year-old playwright who declared, “All modesty is false modesty; otherwise it wouldn’t be modesty.” This is a tricky little epigram but for me it’s on a par with one of these two incidents:

(1) You’ve just won an award from your organization as Most Modest Person of the Year. How can you possibly show up to receive it at the annual banquet? And if you do, what will you say in your acceptance speech? The standard “I really don’t deserve this” simply won’t do.

(2) You’re a rabbi who hits a hole-in-one at a very tough golf course. Trouble is, you do it on Yom Kippur, the most sacred of the Jewish High Holy Days. In short, whom can you tell?