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

Author:David Nihill
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781942952282
Publisher: BenBella Books, Inc.
Published: 2016-03-07T14:00:00+00:00

Don’t forget your lines.

Then there is the big fear: going blank on stage. Standing in front of an audience with no memory of what you’re supposed to say is anxiety-inducing for even seasoned pros. The way to avoid this is to use a memory-recollection technique called the memory palace. Originally introduced in ancient Greek and Roman treatises, the memory palace premise is to create a place or a series of places in your mind where you can store information that you need to remember. In basic terms, it’s a form of memory enhancement that uses visualization to organize and recall information.

Joshua Foer went on a year-long quest to improve his memory under the tutelage of top “mental athletes.” Joshua began the year with a memory just like everybody else’s. He finished that year as the 2006 USA Memory Champion.31 In the book about his experiences, Moonwalking with Einstein, he explains:

How we perceive the world and how we act in it are products of how and what we remember . . . No lasting joke, invention, insight, or work of art was ever produced by an external memory . . . Our ability to find humor in the world, to make connections between previously unconnected notions, to create new ideas, to share in a common culture: All these essentially human acts depend on memory.

One of the most useful and widely used mnemonic or memory aids Joshua learned to utilize is the memory palace, and he is not alone. Many memory contest champions claimed to use this technique in order to recall faces, digits, and listed words. These champions’ successes have little to do with brain structure or intelligence, but more to do with the technique of using regions of their brain for specific learning. Or, in our case, remembering our material and avoiding the dreaded stage blank.

I was introduced to the power of the memory palace by San Francisco–based comedian Richard Sarvate. By night a very funny man, by day a more formal computer programmer at Yahoo!, he applies the same logic and rigor from his corporate office to his nightly adventures in comedy. When creating an image to put in your memory palace, he says, “It is useful to have the image interact with the environment. For my sushi joke I picture a sushi chef. If I put him in the elevator in the lobby of my apartment, I picture him mashing the buttons on the elevator in frustration. Now that he is interacting with the environment, it’s a lot easier to visualize and recall. It’s useful to make the image bizarre in order to make it more memorable. For my Mexican Indian joke I picture Krishna wearing a sombrero. A ridiculous image, which is almost tougher to forget.”

The techniques Richard cites date back to sometime between 86 and 82 B.C. with the first Latin rhetoric textbook, Rhetorica ad Herennium, often referred to as the bible of mental athletes. The ad Herennium, Joshua outlines in his book, “advises readers at

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