Humorous Speech Contest Next Week
Here are a few clues that may help toward your success.
Find Humor in Everyday Life
Think about your everyday life and things that may have a humorous twist to them.
Know Your Audience
Know your audience—it’s particularly important when trying to land a punchline.
It’s a Humorous Speech Contest: Be Funny!
The best Humorous Contest speeches use humour throughout. Try launching into a joke right off the bat to get the audience warmed up and to kick start your own energy level.
Don’t Step on Your Laughter
One of the greatest challenges a humorous speaker faces, aside from producing laughter, is to avoid stepping on it. You can kill a joke entirely by rushing too fast to tell your next one. Effective pauses also enhance jokes.
Consult with Others
Always run your speech by a mentor or trusted advisor. Seeking consultation about risky jokes is imperative.
Becoming an effective humorous speaker can provide incredible internal rewards.
There’s nothing as heartwarming as seeing your audience react with smiles and laughter. We live in a world often marred by violence, tragedy and darkness. When you impart humor in a speech and inspire laughter, you as a speaker derive a real reward.
Public speaking in general requires courage, but delivering humorous speeches in particular demands real fortitude. Stepping onto a stage with the goal of making an audience of strangers laugh can be daunting. But taking on that challenge and producing gut-busting laughter in an audience can be one of the great thrills in the Toastmasters experience.
While delivery, timing and body language are critical to telling a joke, the joke’s success lies in the author’s ability to conceive it. Writing an original, clean joke that will deliver a punch takes time and patience, and hones one’s creativity. To make humor work, the speaker must also properly place the joke within the speech, build appropriate context around it and structure the speech effectively. The reward is the development of one’s speech-writing skills.
A version of this article appeared in the June 2015 issue of the Toastmaster magazine.
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