Elizabeth Day: Small talk doesn’t need to be boring. Here’s how I make parties more fun

The comedian Mae Martin recently confessed on my podcast, How To Fail, that they hated small talk. The idea of it was enough to prevent them from going to parties and triggering a social anxiety spiral. So Martin came up with an elegant solution: they devised a list of handy quick-fire questions designed to elicit revealing, funny and interesting answers. In this way, they always had a prompt for conversation.