Which birthdays actually count as milestones in Britain, and is a 21st still one of them?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nEighteen, twenty-one, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, seventy and every decade afterwards are the ones people mark, and past seventy the family usually makes more of it rather than less. Twenty-one is the odd one out. It was the legal coming of age until the age of majority dropped to eighteen, which is why old cards carry a picture of a key: the key of the door, handed over at twenty-one. Legally it now means nothing at all, and it is still widely celebrated, often more heavily than the eighteenth. Treat it as a proper milestone, and treat the key of the door as material for a joke rather than a straight reference, because most people under fifty have no idea where it came from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You are a good deal older than the birthday person. Does that change what you can joke about?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nIt changes the direction the joke is allowed to point. Teasing somebody about turning thirty when you passed fifty a while back reads as smug however lightly it is meant, because the real punchline is how much time they have left rather than anything about them. The version that works puts you in the frame instead: what you got wrong at that age, what nobody warned you about, what you would swap for their knees. Going the other way, with a younger writer and an older birthday, the safe ground is admiration with a dry edge rather than sympathy. Anything that reads as consolation for still being here lands badly at sixty and worse at seventy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is a surprise party. What do you write when you cannot ask them anything?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nWrite for the person rather than the event, because you have no idea yet how the event will go. A surprise fortieth can end with the guest of honour delighted or quietly furious, and a card that leans hard on the ambush is only funny in one of those outcomes. Keep the joke on the number and on them, and let a single line acknowledge that none of this was their idea. It is also worth writing the card before you set off: the last quarter of an hour before the door opens is spent whispering in somebody’s dark kitchen, and nobody in the history of surprise parties has written anything good in those conditions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The party has slipped into the following year. Do you still write 40th on the card?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nYes. The birthday happened when it happened and the party is a separate thing. Write the number they turned rather than the number they are now, and if the gap is obvious, say so plainly in the first line, because a fiftieth held eight months late is funnier acknowledged than ignored. The exception is a card handed over on the actual day of the next birthday, when the number on it should be the current one. If both are being marked at the same event, pick the round one to carry the joke and mention the other in passing. Two numbers competing for the same punchline kills it outright.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Is a joke about retirement fair game in a 60th message when they are still working?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nOnly if they raise it first. Sixty and sixty-five no longer line up with leaving work for most people, and a card full of slippers, gardening and long lie-ins can read as a hint rather than a joke, particularly if the last year at work has been a difficult one. The safer target is the paperwork side of getting older: the letters that start arriving unprompted, the forms with a new box on them, the sudden interest official bodies take in you. That is genuinely absurd and assumes nothing. If they have a date in the diary and talk about it cheerfully, the whole seam opens up. A seventieth is different ground again, where the jokes belong to whatever they are actually doing now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A milestone birthday is the one occasion where the number is the whole point. Nobody frames the card for a thirty-third; they frame it for the thirtieth, and whatever you write has to acknowledge the figure on the front without labouring it. The trick isn’t to be funnier than usual \u2014 it’s to be specific. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":584,"featured_media":5823,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2958],"tags":[],"moimportance":[],"motype":[],"moformat":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-5822","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-greetings"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/birminghamname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5822","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/birminghamname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/birminghamname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/birminghamname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/584"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/birminghamname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5822"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/birminghamname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5822\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5826,"href":"https:\/\/birminghamname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5822\/revisions\/5826"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/birminghamname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5823"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/birminghamname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5822"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/birminghamname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5822"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/birminghamname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5822"},{"taxonomy":"moimportance","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/birminghamname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/moimportance?post=5822"},{"taxonomy":"motype","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/birminghamname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/motype?post=5822"},{"taxonomy":"moformat","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/birminghamname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/moformat?post=5822"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}