Nothing is better than when you can make a live audience break up with laughter while you are giving a speech. Of course, nothing is worse than attempting humor, everyone knows it, and you fail.
Many beginning and intermediate speakers feel like they have to have some humor in their speech, especially at the beginning, or their speech will be a failure.
Not so. You can be a great speaker, and never, ever get laughs.
If you are going to attempt humor, there are several guidelines you should follow.
- Don’t tell jokes. “Joke” telling is a tough skill to master. Something most
standup comics work on nightly for years before they master proper technique. If you tell a joke, don’t act like you know it is a joke—and make sure you have a personal connection to it.
- Never telegraph a joke or humorous anecdote. Don’t say, “I’d like to tell you
a humorous story about…” Simply tell the story. Your audience will decide whether or not it’s humorous. If you announce you are trying to tell something funny, you eliminate the element of surprise, which is crucial to much humor. Plus, you immediately increase your audience’s expectations. When you pronounce that a story is going to be funny, a certain percentage of your audience is going to think, “Well, I’ll be the judge of whether or not it’s funny.”
- Don’t start your speech with a funny story of joke. Many in your audience will
expect you to tell a joke at the beginning. It’s OK to plan to use a humorous story, but place it in the middle or near the end.
- Don’t tell well-known humorous stories or anecdotes. Everyone has heard the
one about the boat that thought the lighthouse was another boat. Don’t tell it again. All of your humor needs to seem to be a natural part of who you are and what you do. Otherwise, you will seem like a second-rate comic who just got kicked out of the Catskills.
- Don’t tell humor that isn’t specific to some point you are trying to make. If
you are telling a funny story just to be funny, the stakes become much higher. At a subconscious level, your audience is now comparing you to other professional comics like Jerry Seinfeld. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to compete with Jerry Seinfeld. That is not a battle you or I will win.
The best way to use humor in a speech is to simply tell a real life story where something funny happened to you. You know it is funny because when you relayed the incident to fiends and family, they laughed hard. Now, when you tell it in front of a large audience, you are likely to get a laugh. And if you don’t, it won’t seem like you flopped, because you were simply telling a story to make your point. You won’t seem like you were trying too hard, therefore it wasn’t a flop.
Go break a leg!
