Tremendous Interest in forming a Humourous Toastmasters Club

The Calgary Humourous Toastmasters club (official name to be determined) has had tremendous interest. There have been 20 people express interest in a specialty club focused on humour, enough to charter!

With all this interest, we move to the next step, the planning of the first meeting, but there are 3 big issues to address...where the club will meet and at what time and day of the week.

Would anyone know of a venue where the club could meet? Perhaps someone works at company that would allow us to meet there? (the location could rotate between different locations).

We’ve created this blog to get the discussion going. http://calgaryhumourtm.blogspot.com/

We have sample agendas and all kinds of tips on how to do create and run a humour club from three existing humour clubs in the USA.

They sound like they are having a lot of fun and they are willing to help us further. We have included some of the information below.

Some of the items on a typical agenda –

Manual speeches with the objective to add humour to all of the speeches
“Ha” (laugh) counters instead of “ah” counters. – beanbag or stuffed animal that laughs
Current events monologue similar to late night talk show host (2 to 3 minutes)
Improv exercises/demonstrations
Tool time – learning how to do those pauses, set up a joke, what is funny, how to tell a joke
Informative speeches with handouts
2-3 minute stand up routines
3 speeches, 3 evaluators, stand up evaluators
Awards such as Most Improved and “Hollywood/Best Person”

The focus for the existing clubs in the USA tends to be twofold:

To show that any Toastmaster can develop their innate humorous abilities.
To take humourous skills to a greater level than what a traditional club could offer.

There are LOTS of ideas our club can build from and as mentioned the existing clubs are willing to help us get it up and going.

Please give us some comments on the blogspot (in particular on a place to meet for starters) and let’s see if we can make a Humour club a reality in Calgary!

http://calgaryhumourtm.blogspot.com/

Kind regards,

Joan M., Palmo C., John S.