“Words: so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.” — Nathaniel Hawthorne
Good speeches motivate people and even change their lives. At least, a good speech is capable of changing someone’s point of view. The truth is, it is not enough to provide a number of strong arguments – you need to make people listen to what you have to tell them.
Catching attention is crucial. What we can learn from most of the TED speeches is that nothing grabs listeners’ attention as firmly as humor. When knowledge is delivered through humor, it is digested by people much easier.
Why Humor Helps?
If you look at the most common tips on giving a presentation, you can see that humor fits in there perfectly. So why is it always better to insert some of it into a speech?
- Picking a topic that will be interesting and fun to the audience is always a nice start.
- Humor helps you to be positive and optimistic. (Staying positive is often listed #1 among the presentation tips.)
- A joke will help you to deal with your fear of the audience, if you have one. It will also help you to gain confidence during your speech.
- Humor serves as a great tool for connecting with people. After you tell something funny, you and your audience will be sharing the same joke.
- Joking will help to have the audience alert and keep their energy levels up.
- Facts can bore people; it is always better to change them with stories and jokes.
- Giving a speech is not about just presentation, but also about performance. You can grab your audience’s attention with body language and make it funny. This will make you easily recognizable and remembered.
Integrate Humor Wisely
You should remember that your initial purpose is not to be funny, but to deliver your idea in an entertaining way, so that it is smoothly processed by the audience and easily memorized. It is important to integrate humor wisely. This is why giving a humorous speech may involve a lot of hard work and practicing, either around your friends or in front of the mirror.
Amy Schumer, an American comedy actress, gave a brilliant speech in May 2014. She raised a very serious topic of a woman’s self-image and confidence associated with it. She talked about her experience of feeling less loved and, as a result, being seduced by an older guy, and also about the way she regained her dignity and confidence. Although some parts of the story were detailed and almost terrifying, she managed to soften the truth she wanted to deliver by introducing some jokes. As Charlie Chaplin once said, “To truly laugh, you must be able to take your pain, and play with it.”
If you want to make your speech fascinating and memorable, make it funny. It does not have to be entirely a joke, but some humor will grab the audience’s attention. Even the most serious topics are processed better if people can laugh along with you. You can experiment with different techniques: tell ready jokes, insert funny words, or use metaphors and exaggerate them, but it is important that you do not forget about the purpose of your speech and your audience’s need to get the answers they are promised.