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Use Humor to Spice Up Your Next Speech
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Anyone can use humor
Appropriate humor relaxes an audience and makes them feel more comfortable with you as the speaker.
Humor can bring attention to the point you are making and help the audience better remember it.
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Developing Anecdotes
The best and most comfortable place to find humor comes from your own personal experience.
Jot down funny ideas as you come across it that might appeal to your audience - an embarrassing moment that you might not have found funny at the time, or a funny conversation you had.
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Honing the Delivery
Make sure your choose humor is funny to you. First practice with small groups of people. Pay attention to the way your are delivering the joke or quip.
Only use humor in a speech after you are comfortable telling it from memory and have tested it.
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Potential Misfires Of Using Humor
Don’t preview your humor by saying, “Let me tell you a funny story.”
Look pleasant and smile as you launch into your funny line, but if no one smiles or laughs, then just move on as though you meant for it to be serious.
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Humor at work
Being funny can have both positive and negative consequences, in your personal as well as your professional life. And context is always important: when making a joke, for instance, you should defin...
Humor and its effects on the status
Humor and status have always been tightly linked: good leaders seem to often use humor in order to motivate their team members' actions. As individuals, we tend to prefer, researchers claim, jokes that make us laugh while feeling slightly uncomfortable.
Furthermore, we perceive the joke teller as a self-confident person, who could easily become a leader due to his or her courage to make such a joke. The key point here is that the joke should be appropriate and match the context.
Inside jokes
Making inside jokes usually shows how bounded a team or a group is: their jokes can understood the best by themselves.
However, the moment an outsider integrates the group, it is better to avoid the inside jokes, as this will most probably make him or her feel out of place.
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Humor benefits to marketing materials
- Humor breaks down walls, shows personality a.k.a. shows a brand's human side.
- Humor is attention-grabbing. It is naturally colorful and origin...
What humor is, at its worst
- The wrong joke at the wrong time. It can make your brand look amateurish and unprofessional.
- If people think you’re cracking jokes for the sole purpose of getting more attention, you’ll be seen as exploitative rather than funny.
- Humor can cheapen certain ideas or make them be taken less seriously.
- In some cases, humor can be outright offensive.
Key areas to create value with humor
- Humorous touches can almost always improve a piece that is already valuable on its own.
- If you’re sure a joke is going to land, it can make an effective advertisement. Test variations of the joke with a small audience first; that way, you can be sure the humor doesn’t cross a line.
- Brand differentiation. For example, Oreo has long differentiated itself by offering a quirky, tongue-in-cheek voice across its social media platforms. This is especially effective in dry, or otherwise “boring” industries.
- Personal branding. Elon Musk, for example, has separated himself from his companies Tesla and SpaceX by cracking jokes and roasting people on his own account.
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Key Ideas
Traditional jokes with punch lines are the hardest to pull off
Trickster humor is all about finding contradictions that we've stopped noticing and pointing them out. It is also about crossing boundaries that are normally left intact. The t...
3 rules for making irony memorable
- Create an overarching story that is different from what you’re apparently talking about.
- Something important has to be at stake.
- Its viewpoint has to run counter to the one held by those currently in power.
Wit is the humor that creates charm
It also impresses with intelligence:
- But don’t try too hard. Wit flows from passion for the subject.
- Wit is all about overturning expectations. The wit is in the surprise.
- To be witty, take the subject, but not yourself, seriously. Wit begins with yourself, with self-deprecation.