Message 3 (final message):
Quipping
I think one more ESTP quality deserves comment. One of the ways ESTPs take charge of any event is by quipping and one-upping and generally showing a lively ability to take the situation and play with it amusingly:
From Keirsey's PUM:
Charming, confident, popular, these tough, outgoing [ESTPs] carry on amusing repartee with friends and colleagues, the laughter surrounding them as they recount from their endless supply of quips, anecdotes, and jokes...
So for example, right at start of the Letterman clip, MS walks out on stage in her elegant long dress and Letterman kisses her on the hand; MS then turns the table on him and kisses his hand in return. It's funny partly because it's a turn-around. It also involves some one-upmanship in that MS sets up an elegant moment with the grand entry, Letterman's kiss adds to the elegance, but MS's kiss parodies Letterman's kiss and is merely comic.
The same thing happens when Letterman's staff bring out a large bouquet of roses. The rose are meant to heighten the elegance of the moment, but MS turns the moment on its head when she says "I feel like a horse" (the reference is to large bouquets brought out for winning racehorses).
Of course, there's nothing wrong with any of this. It's a comedy show, Streep is a comedian, and her quips merely come off as charming self-deprecation. Still it shows one of her chief tools for seizing the moment and making it her own.
MS does this repeatedly to some extent or another throughout all the clips. She uses quips, word play, turn-about, self-deprecation, and even pauses and physical poses to seize control of the pacing of the conversations and put herself in charge of it. And throughout it all, she manages to keep looking elegant and fun-loving.
This same thing happens in the AFI clip. MS constantly alternates between elegance and slapstick, showing one moment that she can do the grand Hollywood gestures and then in the very next moment parodying herself. On her walk to the stage, she is sometimes greeting friends and kissing cheeks, but then partway along she mimics sleepwalking. Once on stage, she plays the grand dame with curtseys and broad gestures, but then she also collapses on the dais with a groan and then whips out some notes and slaps them on the dais and ruffles through them as though to make no pretence of hiding the fact that she has prepared some comments, and she grabs her dress front as though to adjust her cleavage.
Anything is fodder for a laugh, like her pause to play with the "two small words" pun. It doesn't matter if the joke interrupts the pacing of the moment; in fact jokes like that are attractive to her precisely because they keep changing up the pacing and turning things on their head.
Even her homage to her dead parents in the AFI clip turns into slapstick. She says that she wants to thank 4 people in her life who are in heaven; she recalls her mother and father somberly at first, but then makes a joke about the drama in the house when she was growing up. Then she makes a joke about her dressmaker, "who isn't dead!" she happily notes. Then she says, "Thank you," and says "I'll get off" as though responding to a sign. Then she goes on for another couple lines about being proud and grateful (having forgotten the other 2 people in heaven). Then, even as the music wells up, she starts yelling "I forgot Roy! Roy!" and jumps up and down and points out into the audience. All in all, the entire effect is a whirlwind of elegance and low slapstick hilarity at the same time.
Also, she appears a bit miffed if anyone ruins one of her jokes. In the clip about "The Questionnaire," MS is looking professional, nicely coiffed, in a business suit of sorts; she plays a number of roles, alternately being kittenish, girly, seductive; she uses long pauses to elicit laughs, and she acts thoughtful and then parodies her own thoughtfulness by holding the pose too long.
At one point the interviewer asks MS for her favorite obscenity. MS answers demurely with "Oh my God" as her choice, but then she goes for the big laugh by saying it would be nice if "cocksucker" were her favorite. The audience laughs, but the interviewer is unruffled and says that that particular obscenity was chosen by two other actresses. MS turns away looking a little peeved, as though the interviewer has one-upped her and ruined her moment.
Extravert/Introvert
The last two sections about working the audience and quips would seem to be proof of an extravert orientation. But some people have pointed to MS's well-known need to stay close to home as proof that she requires extensive downtime.
But I think that only indicates a commitment. That is, ESTPs need to win at whatever they do. So a male ESTP will commit himself to a small start-up business and turn it into a billion-dollar empire, and a female ESTP will commit herself to raising the perfect family and showcase it as another big "win."
That may sound cynical to say. But I already mentioned in an earlier post that I have an ESTP female relative, and she tended to view her own family as one more place to excel. So, like MS, my relative would make a big show of placing her family first. She would go home and devote much energy to creating the perfect childhood for her children: parties, social events, encouraging the kids to take on big splashy projects and then sharing their fun, etc.
Similarly, MS notes that one of her adult sons is in a rock band and she attends his concerts; that sounds like a very ESTP way of parenting.
IOW, it may be that for MS the family is one more social scene, one more crowd to work, one more place to excel. That doesn't take anything away from her devotion to her home and her family. But it would indicate that home is
not a place for downtime for her. If anything, many people find a big family to be very demanding. If you want downtime, you get
away from the family. Many men leave the home and go to
work in order to get their downtime.
Also, on the clip from The View, MS specifically indicates that she doesn't like downtime or alone time. She says that one of her favorite times when shooting movies is being on the set between scenes when the actors can get together off-camera and clown around. She says that she was unable to do that during the shooting of "Prada" (she needed to keep "distance" from the other actors in order to maintain her role), and as a result she found the shooting of that movie to be miserable for her.
So it sounds like she doesn't enjoy downtime. Like a true ESTP, she probably needs to be "working the crowd" pretty much all the time to feel alive.