Just when I think he’s running out of steam with a good fifty seconds left on the monitor, he brings up the example of neighborhoods falling into disarray without “the benefit of gentrification.” It’s brazen and easily refutable in writing, but there’s no way for the St. Celeste boys to come at such a broad argument without rhetorically unraveling themselves. Two of the three judges seated in the front row take dispassionate notes.

The second round is me. Which is objectively the better color: blue or red?

Silly rounds are my jam. I go all personality on this one, starting with a comment about how our competition didn’t have to make that choice in designing their uniform. It’s the sort of cheeky self-awareness that works well in jolting the audience.

I go for the comedic angle and passionately commit to red as though the alternative of blue was a grotesque offense to my very being.

“It is the most inoffensive color in the spectrum of the human eye for a reason, people. There are studies that I won’t cite here because they are so numerous and definitely real that confirm beyond a shadow of scientific doubt that the color blue is in fact the favorite color of your most boring coworker. . . . Shannon in HR loves it!”

A few chuckles start to pepper the room. For four minutes, two hundred forty seconds, I obliquely and then directly talk about the blandness of people who proudly declare blue to be their favorite color.

“They’re the same people who call fall ‘their season.’ Love Labradors, and put their interests down as being ‘music’ and ‘laughter.’ Be honest. Have you— Has anyone in this audience ever had a conversation with one of these people where you didn’t want to claw yourself out of your own skin? Be honest.”

More laughter. It’s nonsense, but the only people actively frowning are the St. Celeste boys, unhappy with the temperature of the room no longer leaning their way, which is just how I like it.

“And if you were offended by this statement because you love your Labrador, ‘Lucy,’ and think music and laughter are gosh darn neat, then I suggest you go stare at an robin’s-egg blue wall to regain your composure.”

In the end, I clock three laughs, one snort, and an aborted round of applause that’s quieted down by the judge. They have no idea what I just said—which rhetorically amounts to nothing—but loved hearing it.

The Haltiwanger method. St. Celeste’s own silly round (“music or silence?”) is treated too seriously to be entertaining, and one judge actually checks his watch.