Why Add Humour to Your Speeches?

• Do you want to be a funnier speaker?
• Do you want to establish a bond with your audience?
• Learn techniques to win over a hostile audience?
• Learn how to keep your audience interested?
• Emphasize or illustrate a point?
• Help people remember you?
  

Incorporating humour into your speeches can help you do this and more!
People pay more attention to a speaker who uses humour.
Humour makes an impression and can break the ice or defuse a situation.

Wit Pleasure Advanced Toastmasters can help you use humour
in the speeches you normally give to attract and retain the audience's interest and to make points effectively.

You don't need to be funny to join. Wit Pleasure is a safe place to learn how!

For more information email calgaryhumourTM@gmail.com

Workshop: Humourize your speech!

Workshop: August 27/11 - special Wit Pleasure presentation at Club Officer Training, Calgary, Alberta

Abstract: Humour is a valuable tool for a speaker. When used appropriately, it can relax an audience and help the audience members to connect with the speaker. People enjoy laughing, and are likely to remember the key points of a speech if they are amused. A humourous speech does not have to consist of a series of build-ups and punch lines to be successful; everybody has a different sense of humour, and it’s important for speakers to capitalize on their own strengths. In this workshop the presenters will illustrate techniques that can be used to incorporate humour into any speech. Participants will take part in “humourizing” a speech excerpt, and will have the opportunity to assess their own types of humour.It doesn’t take a stand-up comedian to deliver a humour speech. Anybody can do it.

Presenters' bios:

Dayna Tees, CC. VP of Membership at Wit Pleasure. Toastmaster since 2006. Librarian by day, and wanna be comedienne by night, Dayna has always tried to incorporate funny stories and anecdotes into her speeches and in her work as library manager for a chemical company. Dayna still remembers the day when she was teaching scientists about the exciting world of patent searching and they all fell asleep on her! That was the day when she made a promise to become the most entertaining librarian anyone had ever seen before – so that no one would ever dare to fall asleep on her again!

Deborah Thompson, ACB, ALB has been a Toastmaster since 2007 and a member of Wit Pleasure since 2010. She is a database administrator and developer, which pretty much translates into "computer geek", although she generally prefers "computer god". And no - she won't fix your computer. Deborah loves making people laugh, and her sole goal in Toastmasters is to be entertaining enough to win the "Best Table Topics" ribbon every week. Her family features heavily in her humourous speeches, and thus she has no Thanksgiving plans this year.

2 Great Tips to add humour!

Give that next speech pizazz!
Here are four great tips for adding humour.

1. CHEMICAL EQUATION FOR COMEDY
Attitude + Topic + Premise + ActOut + MixUp + ActOut

The four funny attitudes: Wierd, Scary, Hard or Stupid
(from Judy Carter's - The Comedy Bible - published by Simon & Schuster)

For example: You know what's scary (Attitude) about elevators (Topic)? You have no guarantee they are labelled correctly. (Premise) What if the installer has a wierd sense of humour and has the elevator stop at random floors? Tum de dum.... What the...! (Act Out) Can you imagine if elevators worked like escalators? (MixUp / Premise) I think I'll get off ... now. SMACK! (ActOut).

You don't need to actually state the attitude or premise. This is in the equation to help you formulate your thoughts and give you direction. Ideally, the attitude will come across in the acting out, the funny voices and the body language. The Chemical equation does not deliver a funny joke or comedy bit 'fully formed' but it does stimulate your thinking process and help ferment the idea from which the comedy will be derived. It is the 'Amino Acid' of humour. The jokes and funny thoughts are spawned from stirring and playing with this equation. Once you have a promising topic, premise and attitude, now you can polish it and mold it into a joke or routine.



2. ADD COLOUR

Since most people would be creating their speech or presentation in a word processor of some type, you can do this either on your screen or on a hard copy you have printed.

With multi-colored highlighters, read through the entire speech/presentation and highlight the Humor in Yellow. Mark the Stories in Red. Highlight the Learning points in Green. Identify the opening and closing segments in Blue. This will give you a colourful map of your talk to see, at a glance, the balance of stories, humor and learning points. You'll also visually see how much time you have devoted to your opening and close.

For a Standup routine limit the colours to 2 - one for SetUp; the second for Punchline.

The colours themselves are not critical in themselves, just used to differentiate the segments of your speech.

===> Check out Wit Pleasure's Wetpaint site for even MORE Tips!