Orbit Activity 2

Humorous speaking is a very valuable skill to have as a speaker to use within presentations at Rostrum, but are also invaluable outside Rostrum. To be able to build humour into presentations at work or in the community is a great skill. Humour builds engagement with the audience.

Activity 2 – Humorous presentation

Duration: 3-5 mins 
Pre-requisites: Completion of Launchpad Program

Aim

To deliver a presentation that makes the audience laugh. Note: This activity is NOT about telling jokes.

Objectives

  1. To deliver a humorous story or presentation
  2. Experiment with different types of humour
  3. Understand that successful humour has a structure

The Why…

Humorous presenting is often a challenge for people. The reason it’s early in the Orbit program is to give members an understanding, and to practice the process of structuring and delivering humour. Good humour is always structured. But the best humour doesn’t appear to be structured. It comes across as a story, which is exactly what we want.

Humorous speaking is a very valuable skill to have as a speaker to use within presentations at Rostrum, but are also invaluable outside Rostrum. To be able to build humour into presentations at work or in the community is a great skill. Humour builds engagement with the audience.

The How

Specific guidelines on how to tackle this activity.

Look into your memory banks for things that have happened in your recent and distant past that are humorous. The best way, and the best things to find are things that have happened to you. Self deprecating humour, or laughing at yourself, is nearly always the best type of humour
to use.

Go looking for experiences which could have happened today, yesterday, last week or 10 or 30 years ago. The more recent, generally the more engaging it is, but a good speaker can make something that happened 20 years ago sound as if it happened yesterday.

Write down the 3 aspects of the incident:

  • The setup; the context, the when, where, how of what happened.
  • The what; what actually happened
  • The result of what happened; the ‘So What’? Much like Activity 1, consider what the moral, lesson, result or punchline is and consider whether it’s better delivered as a shock at the start, or built up slowly and delivered at the end.

Humour is built on this “Rule of 3”.

Also consider what other types of humour you can inject into the presentation:

  • Physical (also known as slapstick) – where you use facial expressions or mime to really bring your story to life.
  • Word based – where you can use double entendres, or play with language so as to evoke humour (puns, dad jokes etc).
  • Topical – where you can (appropriately) bring in what is happening in current affairs your audience can relate to.
  • Self deprecation – where you literally poke fun at yourself
  • Audience interaction – where you can use what you know about members of the audience to enhance your story (not making fun of them, but using what you know about them to add to your story)

Tips and traps

Trap: Telling jokes. Don’t tell jokes. Humorous presentations are not about jokes. The best humorous speakers never tell jokes, but they still have the audience laughing. They’re laughing at the story and the incident, not jokes.

Tips: Read stories that are humorous. Go to secondhand book shops and find books that contain humorous stories and use those. Don’t read them aloud. Either retell them in your own words, or use them as inspiration to spice up a story from your own life. No-one needs to know whether the story is actually true or not.

Trap: Do not build the humour around humiliating someone, particularly if that person is in the audience. There was a time when humiliation humour was the rage. Thankfully it lasted a very short amount of time. The people who delivered humiliation humour were rarely invited back to speak a second time. It’s certainly not something that should be done in Rostrum. However, it’s ok to humiliate and embarrass yourself as long as people understand you’re fine with it.

Guidelines for Program Director:

The humorous presentation should be rostered to one member in a meeting. It’s better not to have an entire meeting of humour unless it’s part of a humour workshop.

If you’re going to run a humour workshop then clearly a number of humorous presentations following that works well. But in a regular Rostrum meeting, it’s better just to have one humorous presentation or two at the most.

Depending on the experience of the speaker, the duration will change. For an experienced speaker you may give 6 minutes. On the other hand, a person going through Orbit for the first time should be rostered for 3 or 4 minutes.

As Program Director, you need to know your members really well so you know what is the best time frame for them. Always come to planning the program from the perspective of what is the best for the speaker, rather than what is best for the club, and then strike a balance between those two things.