Do You Talk Funny? 7 Comedy Habits to Become a Better (and Funnier) Public Speaker by David Nihill

Author:David Nihill [Nihill, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: FunnyBizz Books
Published: 2015-01-11T07:00:00+00:00

Use funny images and video:

While you should prioritize the time to write some humor into your presentations, sometimes that’s easier said than done. If you feel too busy to step back for a moment and look at simple ways to add some creativity, in our case, aimed at generating laughs and lightening the mood, then you can rely on funny images and video to do that for you. This image was used to great laughter in a TED talk to make the point: “Entrepreneurs: We are the rule breakers.”

It’s great if these images or videos are your own but they do not have to be. Go on Google images and type “funny” and then your topic area. More often than not you will come up with a usable image that most of your audience will not have seen before. The key is tying this image to your topic and using it to reinforce a point. Search sites like Reddit and Pinterest are another great source of content that is already socially proven. Often you just need to change one word, the setup or overlay some text to integrate it into your speech.

Seth Godin is an entrepreneur, blogger and marketer known for his engaging and entertaining presentations. His talk titled “Broken” is always referred to, even by TED themselves as hilarious. And it is. To put it into perspective, he makes people laugh approximately 3.4 times per minute through his 20-minute talk. If you apply the same loose metric (more on this in Chapter 7) to Hollywood’s top comedy movies, he actually makes people laugh more times than such comedy classics as Airplane, The Hangover and The Naked Gun. As presenters go, Seth is excellent and always funny. However, when we analyze his talks, we realize they are considerably funnier the more funny images he includes. In this talk, over half of the laughs stem from jokes linked to images he included.

Use the same joke structure with images and videos as you would with written material. Set up your image with an introduction that builds anticipation. The image becomes the punch line and should be enough to solicit a laugh, and then you have a chance to keep people laughing through taglines, your additional comments on the image or video. Seth is by no means alone in his use of images. Keep an eye out for just how many laughs occur in presentations with the use of funny images.

Remember: There is always a more creative way to introduce your idea. If you are worried about clever writing or your delivery, using videos and images can be a great way of taking the pressure off while bringing the laugh levels up. A little effort here can go a long way.

These quick comedy tips when taken together and added to your presentation can make a big impact in generating humor every time. They will not make you a funnier person in life but, like Ryan, they will make you funnier on stage. And if you want to make it especially easy, my advice is to head out to Stockton.

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