The Zombie Guide to Public Speaking: High School Edition by Vrooman Steven

Author:Vrooman, Steven [Vrooman, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-04-29T16:00:00+00:00

How To

Obviously my first suggestion is to do enough research into the lives and stories of the people whose issues you are speaking about to find these bits of humor. Or else, speak about something you know more securely.

The second suggestion comes from educational research, which suggests that self-disparaging humor is particularly effective for teachers (Wanzer, Frymier, & Irwin, 2010). Wheeler (1957) suggests something similar in his community and business speaking experience.

Given how important occasional humor is for attention, memory, and processing of information, we need to find ways to keep it up, but searching for jokes may not always be a good idea. Jokes, in fact, are really easy to mess up and should be avoided if you are not good at telling them (Sprague & Stuart, 1996). In addition, they are the most likely form of humor to be inappropriate.

Sprague and Stuart (1996) suggest some alternate ways to find humor, and most of these serve the purpose of the dual-processing perspective by incongruity that is closely aligned to humor’s real impact on audiences. Their ideas will serve as suggestions three through seven .

Strategy three is exaggeration . Prochnow (1942) gives a few examples that count as taking an idea beyond logical limits:

​ Soph.: But I don’t think I deserve a zero.

Prof.: Neither do I, but it’s the lowest mark I’m allowed to give. (p. 90)

And:

“These rock formations,” explained the guide, “were piled up here by the glaciers.”

“But where are the glaciers?” asked a curious old lady.

“They’ve gone back, Madam, to get more rocks,” said the guide. (p. (180)

Strategy four is understatement , which Sprague and Stuart (1996) do just fine with :

The rains had turned the road into an estuary, so I left my car at the front of the hill and walked up. John’s house was still standing, but the mudslide had filled it as if it were a Jell-O mold. The front door was jammed shut. I squeezed through the broken bay window and found John trying to dig his way to the closet door. When he saw me he put down his shovel and shook my hand, saying, “some weather we’re having.” (p. 278).

Strategy five , irony , has many different forms in literary theory (remember “dramatic irony”?) and in rhetoric (bet you’ve never heard of “antiphrasis”), but for us, the idea is to put the unexpected together to see what happens. Prochnow (1942) again:

​ “You look positively beautiful tonight”

​ “Oh, you flatterer!”

“No, it’s true. I had to look twice before I recognized you.” (p. 68)

Simpler forms of irony are easy to create in the moment, especially linked with self-deprecating humor. For example, in my TEDx Talk, one of my visual aids malfunctioned (Vrooman, 2014b). You can still see a tiny artifact of this error in the final video, but they edited most of this moment out (magic!). The biggest laugh I got from the room that day was from my response to the errors (also edited out), when I said, “I teach public speaking, not that you could tell from this.

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