In Defence of the Chair Defence

You know the manoeuvre. You have performed the manoeuvre. You performed it recently.

Something happens. And within a half-second — before thought, certainly before decision — your body shifts its weight sharply against the seat, producing a squeak, a creak, a scrape of leather or plastic or wood, offered to the room as a rival explanation.

It does not work.

It has never worked. There is no recorded instance of it working. And yet it is, by a wide margin, the most frequently attempted deception in ordinary human life — more common than the fake laugh, more common than “I’m five minutes away” — and it is attempted overwhelmingly by adults who know, from long personal experience as an audience, that it does not work.

This is genuinely strange, and it deserves better than a joke.

Why it fails

The defence fails for a reason that is completely obvious the moment you say it aloud and completely invisible from the inside: the timing is wrong, and it can only ever be wrong.

The manoeuvre is a response. It necessarily follows the event it is meant to explain. Which means the room hears a sound, and then, a beat later, hears a second sound offered as the first one — and a room does not need to reason about this. It does not construct an argument. The room simply receives two events in sequence and knows, at a level well below language, that the second one is about the first one.

There is a further problem, which is that the chair is not a plausible instrument. Furniture is capable of a narrow acoustic range: creaks, squeaks, and knocks. It is not capable of duration. It is not capable of pitch bend. Anyone who has sat on a chair — which is everyone — holds a lifetime’s reference library of what chairs sound like, and the great majority of works do not sound remotely like a chair.

And on grass, the defence is simply not available at all, which is why picnics are the most honest places on earth.

Why we do it anyway

Here is the part worth taking seriously.

If the manoeuvre were a deception, it would have died out. Deceptions that never work do not survive; they are too expensive. The chair defence survives because it is not a deception at all. It is something else that merely looks like one.

Consider what it actually accomplishes. It fools nobody. But it does put something into the room — some sound, some motion, some evidence of a person doing a thing — during the two-second interval in which there would otherwise be an unbroken and unbearable silence with a single obvious subject.

It is not an alibi. It is an activity.

And the room, crucially, accepts it. Not as an explanation — nobody believes it — but as a proposal. The chair defence is a formal offer to jointly pretend, extended by the artist and, in the overwhelming majority of cases, accepted by everyone present, who will now proceed as though a chair had made that noise for exactly as long as is required to get past it.

Nobody has ever been fooled by the chair defence and nobody has ever refused it. It is not a lie. It is a ritual, and ritual is what a species does when a situation has no good move in it.

The related forms

Once you see it, you find the same structure everywhere in the repertoire.

The cough. Same timing problem, same total failure rate, same universal acceptance. Additionally, the cough has the disadvantage of being a voluntary human sound, which means it identifies its author, which means the cough is strictly worse than the chair and is nevertheless preferred by roughly half the population.

The sudden loud remark, delivered at nothing in particular. Overwhelmingly attempted by men over fifty, and the least convincing member of the family by some distance, since the volume of the remark tends to be tuned to the magnitude of the event and thus functions as an extremely precise measuring instrument.

The bag rustle. The finest of them all. Slow, sustained, plausibly long — a plastic bag can do things a chair cannot — and available to anyone travelling, which is when it is most needed. If the chair defence is a ritual, the bag rustle is a genuine technique, and the only entry in this catalogue that occasionally deserves to succeed.

The blamed dog, which is a different thing entirely and which we have written about elsewhere, at more length and with more regret.

In conclusion

We would not recommend abandoning the chair defence. There is nothing better, and the alternative — total stillness, total silence, and a room with one open question in it — is meaningfully worse and considerably longer.

We would only ask that you stop believing in it. Perform it, by all means. Perform it well; commit to it; put your shoulder into the seat. But do it in the knowledge that you are not deceiving anybody, that everybody present is agreeing to something rather than being tricked into it, and that the small courtesy being extended to you in that moment is not credulity.

It is kindness. It has always been kindness. And it is, we would argue, one of the better things our species does without ever once discussing it.