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.

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