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 Public Speaking - What About Telling Jokes?

By Barbara Busey

Article posted by MRI Overseas Property

It’s true, there are lots of people who are great joke tellers. A joke can be a great humanizing element in a speech - if it’s funny, if people “get it,” and if it doesn’t offend someone. However, those are a lot of “ifs.” If your joke telling bombs - for whatever reason - it’s an extremely difficult situation to overcome. It’s much harder to go on as if nothing was amiss when you’re feeling embarrassed and humiliated because you didn’t get the laugh you expected. For that reason, I don’t recommend telling jokes in your presentations unless you have a solid track record of being funny. Even then, remember great comedians have “off” nights.

But this doesn’t mean you need to forgo humor. In fact, if you’re inclined to be ultra serious and just get the information out, consider this. Audiences will find your information more interesting and memorable if they enjoyed listening to it. And the primary way they’re going to enjoy it is if they had “fun” listening. In other words, did they laugh and smile and find themselves relating to you?

So humor is a great speaking tool. It’s important to distinguish between being funny and having a sense of humor. You don’t have to be “funny” to be “humorous.” A sense of humor means being able to look at things from an offbeat angle, seeing the humor in the things we take for granted (”Did you ever wonder why we park on a driveway, but drive on a parkway?”). It’s about finding the absurd or poignant in everyday situations that everyone can relate to: think about the “first time” you did practically anything - drove a car or cooked a meal or played golf - there is probably a lot of humor in the retelling! In the end, this is the best form of humor: being able to laugh at yourself.

So how or where do you find humor? Here are some of the best sources

Your life. Take the time to find humor in your real life experiences. I have great speaking stories, from losing my voice to losing my skirt, that always generate appreciative laughter.

The moment. It helps during the presentation if you can be flexible and find humor on the spot. Perhaps you notice on your visual that a word is misspelled. Consider a quip like: “Mark Twain once said he never respected anyone who couldn’t spell a word more than one way.” Maybe, as you begin speaking into the microphone, there’s loud, screeching feedback. Said one speaker, “Must be mating season for microphones.”

The offbeat or unexpected. You do something dramatic - like rip the “shirt off your back” or don a crazy costume or reveal some unexpected prop or visual.

A cartoon. This can be an effective way to get a laugh without putting yourself on the line (if the audience doesn’t laugh, it was the cartoon that wasn’t funny to them — not you). Just a little delivery tip on using cartoons: it’s better if you actually read the cartoon lines out loud to the audience. If you don’t and just let the audience read it for themselves, you’ll lose a lot of impact. People read at different rates and are going to “get it” at different times. That tends to dilute the response. So read it out loud - with all the appropriate inflection.

3 Useful Tips to Good Public Speaking

By Harry Tan

What most people would dread the most is when the need to address a public audience arises.

Even the most notable public speakers would suffer some form of nerve attack when they first started out, and some might even experience so until this very day. Here are 3 tips for you to overcome anxiety.

Tip 1: identify your audience. Most speakers tend to focus on themselves instead of the audience. Remember, the whole point of your speech is educating the audience. Before preparing your script, you should do a rough research on what background your audiences are from. Take it that you’re delivering your scientific research findings for example. If the audiences are fellow researchers as well, you may skip the basic intro assuming they already have prior knowledge.

Tip 2: Total preparation before your speech. Note that during your preparation stage, preparing your script is only the beginning. Choose the type of delivery to use, whether it’s informative, narrative, or some other style to suit your contents. Prepare an outline just in case you forget some crucial points during your presentation.

Tip 3: Just do it. We as humans do speak a lot. One of the ways to improve your public speaking skills is by practicing it. You may have experienced public speaking unknowingly in an informal way, something like talking to a small group of friends. In this case, your friends are just like your audiences. The only difference is the size of the crowd and how familiar you are with them.

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