If you are like most speakers, you are always looking for ways to add some humor to your next speech.
That is always a great idea; however, did you know that some of the things that you may be planning on doing could actually be making it much harder for your audience to laugh during your speech? It turns out that this is possible; perhaps we should uncover what you should not be doing...
3 Ways To Be Unfunny Generally when we are talking about what you need to do to create a great speech, we spend our time talking about how you can go about adding humor to your next speech because of the importance of public speaking.
However, this time around we should take a look at the other side of the coin.
What you need to be careful to not do if you don't want to make the mistake of making your speech unfunny.
The first thing that you need to realize is that a speech is not a standup comedy act.
What this means is that your audience is not expecting you to stand up there and tell them jokes like a comedian does.
Just about the worst thing that you can do is to go on the Internet, find some jokes, and then work them into your speech.
There's a good chance that your audience has already heard them and you probably won't do all that good of a job of delivering them.
Next, when we go looking for humorous material we often start with the one thing that we know the best - ourselves.
What this means is that we can end up treating our audience to a lot of stories about the one thing that they really don't want to hear about - us.
Finally, we often make the mistake of focusing too much on trying to be funny and we forget about why we are giving a speech.
The end result of this is that our speech ends up not having a message.
When we're done, our audience has not been entertained and they're not really sure what our speech was all about.
How To Add Humor To Your Next Speech OK, so if we can all agree that there are a number of different traps that the unwary speaker can fall into, what should we do? The good thing is that the ability to deliver speech that contains humor is not something that we have to be born with.
There are a number of fairly simple things that we can do that will allow us to interject humor into just about any speech that we've been asked to give.
The first thing that you want to remember is that you'll want to keep your humor clean.
This means no curse words or off-color topics.
Both of these paths are easy ways to shock your audience and you'll get a reaction, but it's not true humor and you won't end up getting the reaction that you really want.
Instead, what you are going to want to do is to work some observational humor into your speech.
Just what is observational humor? It's humor that is based on the here and now.
It's humor that comes from the situation that both you and the audience find yourselves in right now.
When you share this kind of humor with your audience they feel like they are "in" on the humor.
A very simple example of this kind of humor can happen when you are giving a speech in a cold room.
You can start your speech off by telling the audience that you are so cold that if you stop half-way through the speech, they should take you outside to warm up and then you'll finish your speech.
This is simple humor, but your audience will appreciate it.
What All Of This Means For You Every speaker wants to add more humor to their next speech in order to do a better job of connecting with their audience.
However, exactly how to go about doing this is never clear.
In fact, avoiding doing things that remove humor from our speech is also critical.
Things that we don't want to do are to use jokes that we've found on the Internet - they generally don't fit and the audience may have heard them before.
Next, we don't want to end up telling a lot of stories about ourselves - our audience just doesn't care.
Finally, our speech needs to have a clear message or else our audience will feel that we've wasted their time.
The key to making your audience laugh is to incorporate spontaneous observational humor.
The good news about making your next speech contain more humor is that it's actually easy to do.
In order to capture the benefits of public speaking you need to have a clear plan for how you are going to go about doing this.
Don't make any of the mistakes that we've discussed - they'll take away from your speech.
Instead, work in the humor that your audience is going to be able to laugh along with.
That is always a great idea; however, did you know that some of the things that you may be planning on doing could actually be making it much harder for your audience to laugh during your speech? It turns out that this is possible; perhaps we should uncover what you should not be doing...
3 Ways To Be Unfunny Generally when we are talking about what you need to do to create a great speech, we spend our time talking about how you can go about adding humor to your next speech because of the importance of public speaking.
However, this time around we should take a look at the other side of the coin.
What you need to be careful to not do if you don't want to make the mistake of making your speech unfunny.
The first thing that you need to realize is that a speech is not a standup comedy act.
What this means is that your audience is not expecting you to stand up there and tell them jokes like a comedian does.
Just about the worst thing that you can do is to go on the Internet, find some jokes, and then work them into your speech.
There's a good chance that your audience has already heard them and you probably won't do all that good of a job of delivering them.
Next, when we go looking for humorous material we often start with the one thing that we know the best - ourselves.
What this means is that we can end up treating our audience to a lot of stories about the one thing that they really don't want to hear about - us.
Finally, we often make the mistake of focusing too much on trying to be funny and we forget about why we are giving a speech.
The end result of this is that our speech ends up not having a message.
When we're done, our audience has not been entertained and they're not really sure what our speech was all about.
How To Add Humor To Your Next Speech OK, so if we can all agree that there are a number of different traps that the unwary speaker can fall into, what should we do? The good thing is that the ability to deliver speech that contains humor is not something that we have to be born with.
There are a number of fairly simple things that we can do that will allow us to interject humor into just about any speech that we've been asked to give.
The first thing that you want to remember is that you'll want to keep your humor clean.
This means no curse words or off-color topics.
Both of these paths are easy ways to shock your audience and you'll get a reaction, but it's not true humor and you won't end up getting the reaction that you really want.
Instead, what you are going to want to do is to work some observational humor into your speech.
Just what is observational humor? It's humor that is based on the here and now.
It's humor that comes from the situation that both you and the audience find yourselves in right now.
When you share this kind of humor with your audience they feel like they are "in" on the humor.
A very simple example of this kind of humor can happen when you are giving a speech in a cold room.
You can start your speech off by telling the audience that you are so cold that if you stop half-way through the speech, they should take you outside to warm up and then you'll finish your speech.
This is simple humor, but your audience will appreciate it.
What All Of This Means For You Every speaker wants to add more humor to their next speech in order to do a better job of connecting with their audience.
However, exactly how to go about doing this is never clear.
In fact, avoiding doing things that remove humor from our speech is also critical.
Things that we don't want to do are to use jokes that we've found on the Internet - they generally don't fit and the audience may have heard them before.
Next, we don't want to end up telling a lot of stories about ourselves - our audience just doesn't care.
Finally, our speech needs to have a clear message or else our audience will feel that we've wasted their time.
The key to making your audience laugh is to incorporate spontaneous observational humor.
The good news about making your next speech contain more humor is that it's actually easy to do.
In order to capture the benefits of public speaking you need to have a clear plan for how you are going to go about doing this.
Don't make any of the mistakes that we've discussed - they'll take away from your speech.
Instead, work in the humor that your audience is going to be able to laugh along with.
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