All speakers would like their next speech to contain more humor. We realize that it is humor that allows us to connect with our audience. If we can find ways to work more humor into our speech, then we will be able to do a better job of sharing our speech and the importance of public speaking with our audience. However, humor is a tricky beast. If we are not careful, we can work material into our speech that will either turn off or turn away an audience. What are the rules for adding more humor to your next speech?
Where Is The Best Place To Get The Humor You Add To Your Speech?
I can only speak for myself, but I really don’t think that I’m all that funny. What that means for me is that when I decide to add some humor to my speech I find myself in a difficult spot. The world that we live in is filled with great sources of humor, but, of course, most of it is humor that I did not create myself. Just like every other speaker out there, when I see something that makes me laugh I am struck with the desire to capture it and work it into my next speech. This brings up the good question: should we work other people’s humorous material into our speech?
It turns out that the really smart people who know how to create a speech that contains humor that will work with an audience have an answer for us. They tell us that under no circumstances should we borrow other people’s humorous material. Understand that you should never use a joke that you didn’t write. Even if you find a joke on the Web, this does not count as writing your own. You need to understand that if you can find it on the web, there is a good chance that people sitting in your audience may have also found it there before they listen to your speech and they’ll recognize that you have stolen somebody else’s material. If you didn’t pay for it, then you stole it. I hope that we can all agree that stealing jokes is not funny for anyone involved.
Avoid Adding Off-Topic “Funny” Stories To Your Speech
One of the things that speakers are often told is that if they want to make their next speech funny, they need to take the time to look around them. The goal is to identify things that are happening in their environment right then and there that they can work into their speech. The thinking is that if you are experiencing something as a speaker, then your audience is probably also experiencing it at the same time. If you can discuss this “thing” with your audience, then you have a good chance of getting a laugh out of them.
However, there is a real danger when we go about doing this. This “observational humor” thing is something that we have to do on the fly – perhaps just before we take the stage. This means that we have not had a chance to practice what we want to say. The goal of adding observational humor to your next speech is to try to make your speech funnier. However, if you make a mistake and end up telling your audience a longwinded story that ends up having nothing to do with the topic of your speech, then you will have not made them laugh and just confused them.
Watch Out For Speech “Landmines”!
One of the key rules to giving a successful speech is to make sure that you know your audience. What this means is that if you find yourself in a situation where you will be addressing an international audience, don’t make the mistake of assuming that they will react to your speech the same way that a domestic audience would. We need to understand that different people will hear and interpret our speeches differently. This means that we have to be careful in what we say.
When it comes to humor we need to understand that what may be funny for one audience may fall flat for another audience. This means that as speakers we need to spend our time looking for landmines in before we give our speech! If you’re speaking to an international audience, you need to not assume that your punch lines will pack the same punch as they did on an ethnically more cohesive audience. What this means for you is that you need to do your research. One way to avoid making mistakes is to try out your material on someone who knows the cultural sensitivities of your audience, Keep in mind that corporate culture can often feel like you’re visiting a foreign land.
Watch Your Words
I almost wish that I didn’t have to cover this topic, but it’s important and so I will. As speakers sit back and think about what they can say in order to get their audience to laugh, we quickly realize that this is not something that is easy to do. What this means is that we will then start to think harder about how we can make it happen in our next speech. More often than not this is where we are going to get confused. We’ll start to think that if we can startle our audience, then we can get them to laugh.
The problem with this line of thinking is that although your startled audience might appear to be laughing, they really aren’t. Instead, they are reacting to what you said in the only way that they know how. What this means for us as speakers is that although it might be tempting to work some curse words into our next speech in order to get a reaction out of our audience, don’t. You need to keep it clean. Remember that you’re no longer 9 years old, and very often people are listening to you while they’re eating lunch. Skip any references to habits or actions that are going to offend any part of your audience.
What All Of This Means For You
The goal of any speech that we give is to allow us to connect with our audience and share the benefits of public speaking. We all know that one of the best ways to connect with an audience is to find a way to make them laugh. The problem with this is that it can be very difficult to work material into a speech that your audience will find funny. Most of us are not comedians and so being funny may not be something that comes naturally to us. Humor can be a difficult thing to include in a speech, what’s the right way for us to go about adding it to our next speech?
Finding where we can get humor to add to our speech can be a real challenge. The one thing that we don’t want to do is to steal someone else’s jokes. It’s wrong and our audience may recognize the material that we’ve stolen. Adding observational humor to a speech is a great idea. However, we have to be careful and not add longwinded stories that end up going nowhere. Speakers need to understand who will be in their audience. If they are addressing an international audience, they need to understand that their jokes may not be seen as funny as they would be a domestic audience. We must always keep our speeches “clean” – don’t be tempted to include offensive language just to get a laugh.
There is no question that humor can be a tricky beast. Although adding more humor to your next speech could be a good idea, you need to be careful about how you go about doing this. If you do a bad job of adding the humor, it’s going to end up taking away from your speech. Take the time to understand the right way to add humor to a speech. If you can get this right, then you’ll be able to build speeches that will allow you to do a better job of connecting with your audience.
– Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Public Speaking Skills™
Question For You: How much humor do you think should be in a 30 minute speech?
Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Communicator Blog is updated.P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Communicator Newsletter are now available. Subscribe now: Click Here!
Note: What we talked about are advanced speaking skills. If you are just starting out I highly recommend joining Toastmasters in order to get the benefits of public speaking. Look for a Toastmasters club to join in your home town by visiting the web site www.Toastmasters.org. Toastmasters is dedicated to helping their members to understand the importance of public speaking by developing listening skills and getting presentation tips. Toastmasters is how I got started speaking and it can help you also!
What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time
Just think for a moment about the last speech that you gave to a business audience. How did it go over? I suspect that you had a series of topics that you wanted to cover and you created a speech that allowed you to do this. You gave your speech, the audience clapped politely and then you sat down. Good news – you shared the importance of public speaking. However, did anyone really get anything out of your speech? Did you really connect with your audience? There is a good chance that you didn’t – most business speeches are boring. What can a speaker do to deliver a business speech that will be remembered?
Does Humor Have A Place In Business?
Every audience loves humor in speeches. Many speakers go to great lengths to incorporate it into their presentations — however, there is one area in which many think humor has no place. That is the world of business. Are they correct? I have seen even the funniest speaker turn as flat as a pancake when presenting a business report. However what we may be missing is the fact that audiences appreciate speakers who can interject humor into business presentations. Speakers have been told for ages that we shouldn’t take ourselves too seriously, because if we do, nobody else will. What speakers need to understand is that humor in business works, with one important caveat. When you are using humor in a business presentation you need to keep your professionalism and credibility.
Humor Can Be Found In Pain
There is a fundamental law of humor – humor consists of both truth and pain. What is humor? Some say that humor is the instinct for taking pain playfully. To be very clear, we are not talking about being hostile to your audience. Speakers need to realize that hostile humor that belittles an audience. This means that it should be avoided at all costs. In contrast to what we should not do, “empathic humor” has a positive intent and therefore serves best in a business situation. With that in mind, we need to find humor that your audience can identify with.
Speakers need to choose areas they can relate to with a little bit of personal pain. Unfamiliar places, traffic jams, software updates, email ping pong and tedious company processes are good examples from the world of business. See if you can tap into these situations for humorous material to use in your presentations. Speakers need to realize that simply maintaining an audience’s attention span is an example of pain, particularly in remote settings. Guess what? That this, in itself, is potentially humorous.
Celebrate The Clash
A great source of humorous material for speakers comes from what is called the “clash of context.” This technique introduces an element of surprise to your audience. Clash of context is about situations or comments that clash unexpectedly with the “normal” expectation of an observer. How can a speaker find examples of clashes? One way is to consider a painful situation you identified and ask yourself what would be the extreme opposite of something that would “normally” be expected to happen. Next you can spice it up. After brainstorming and thinking about a potential clash, now it’s time for you to spice it up. You can go about doing this by exaggerate words and their delivery.
Always Find Ways To Interact With Your Audience
Interaction with your audience is a great way to potentially produce humorous situations that you can use. Something that you can try is using closed questions – those that require a specific answer, or only a yes or no reply when trying to interject humor into a business presentation. The reason that these work so well is because you can nicely interject a clash of context into interactions. Note that in business you don’t necessarily want to go after the big laughs that might win a speech contest. Rather, you are trying to see smiles on people’s faces and an expression of thanks for making a potentially dry topic a bit lighter.
What All Of This Means For You
The one thing that no speaker wants to do is to give a speech that nobody will be able to remember. However, when we are called on to give a speech to a business audience, this is exactly what can happen – we can fail to deliver on the benefits of public speaking. Business speeches tend to be both dry and boring. If we want to make our next business speech better than everyone else’s then we need to find a way to inject some humor into it. By doing this we can create a speech that everyone will remember.
The good news for speakers is that humor does have a place in business presentations. We can use humor to lighten the mood when we are presenting dense data. We can also use humor to get our audience to remember what we are telling them. We need to understand that a lot of humor can be found in the pain that both we as speakers and our audience experience on an everyday basis. If we want to get our audience to laugh with us, then we need to use the clashing of two ideas that don’t normally fit together. We can create humor with our audience simply by taking the time to interact with them during our speech.
Note that it takes time – even for the best speakers – to write and test humor. One must also test your humorous situations in business presentations. If your material doesn’t get a reaction from your audience, refine or replace it, or try something different next time. Test one of the strategies we’ve discussed and see what works. Always take notes of when your audience laughs, and learn from it. Speakers need to realize that humor is a process, and it’s worth making the effort!
– Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Public Speaking Skills™
Question For You: How often do you think that a business audience should laugh during a business speech?
Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Communicator Blog is updated.P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Communicator Newsletter are now available. Subscribe now: Click Here!
Note: What we talked about are advanced speaking skills. If you are just starting out I highly recommend joining Toastmasters in order to get the benefits of public speaking. Look for a Toastmasters club to join in your home town by visiting the web site www.Toastmasters.org. Toastmasters is dedicated to helping their members to understand the importance of public speaking by developing listening skills and getting presentation tips. Toastmasters is how I got started speaking and it can help you also!