How was your last speech received by your audience? If you talked with them an hour, a day, or even a week after you gave the speech no matter how good their listening skills were, do you think that they would remember what you had said? If the answer is no, then you’ve got some work to do. I have some good news for you, don’t worry about learning new presentation tips — fixing this problem might be as simple as adding some humor to your speech.
You Are The Funniest Subject
Often when we want to add humor to our speeches, we’ll go on a hunt looking for topics that we believe that our audience will find funny. The truth is that one of the funniest topics is already staring back at us when we look in the mirror: ourselves.
We have all had a unique set of life experiences that have gotten us to where we are. We also go through a set of routines each and every day that our audience probably also goes through. We can draw from both of these groups of experiences and by adding just a bit of exaggeration we can transform events from our past into humorous moments for our audience.
Boys vs. Girls Always Gets A Laugh
No matter how hard we try to be sensitive to the other gender, it seems like we are always making mistakes. These mistakes more often than not result in miscommunications or misunderstandings between men and women.
Considering the fact that your audience will probably be made up of both genders, using the types of miscommunications that can occur between genders is a great source of humorous material. Everyone will have had a similar experience and so getting your audience to laugh will be very easy.
Read The Newspaper, Get A Laugh
The key to creating humorous material that will really get a laugh out of your audience is to make it as topical as possible – use current events whenever possible. Your local newspaper or TV channels are a great source of this type of material.
The trick to making this type of humor source work for you is to be careful to make sure that everyone in the audience will be aware of the story that you will be referencing. Stay away from the industry specific stories if you have a general audience. Try to stick with the stories that have made the front page of your newspaper.
What All Of This Means For You
We all know about the importance of public speaking and so we want each of our speeches to be remembered by our audience. One of the most effective tools that a public speaker has is humor. The more humor that you can pack into your next speech, the better the chances are that your audience will be able to remember what you said. All of this means that you’re going to have to find good sources of humor that you can use.
I’ve got good news for you: great humor for your next speech is all around you. It turns out that poking fun at yourself is a great way to get your audience to laugh. The differences between men and women is another fantastic source of humor material. Finally, just by opening a newspaper you can find a lot of comedy in current events.
It takes time, energy, and effort to work humor into a speech. It’s worth the effort because of the benefits of public speaking. The results of working humor into your next speech make this well worth the effort. Next time that you are asked to give a speech, take some time and do some digging – the humor that you find will make your next speech just that much better!
– Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Public Speaking Skills™
Question For You: Do you think that the boys vs. girls source of humor material would be wrong for some audiences?
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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
When you sit down to prepare your next speech, do you know what the most important thing that you are going to need is? It turns out that it’s not a clean sheet of paper, nor a sharp pencil. Nor is it a quiet place to work although all of these things are important, they are not the most important thing. The one thing that you’re going to need if you want to create a great speech is a good idea. Now just exactly where do those come from?