How to Be Funny in a Speech When You Are Not a Comedian
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How to be funny in a speech when you’re not a comedian
Comedians aren’t funny in real life.
Like any other profession, funny is what they do, not what they are.
In real life, comedians work and struggle just like the rest of us to be good at their jobs. Joan Rivers, Richard Pryor, Billy Connolly Chris Rock – all the greatest comics wrote, rewrote and rehearsed their routines with great care and diligence, using classic techniques for content and delivery to get the laughs. If you have a speech or presentation to give, and it needs to be funny throughout or more probably needs to use humour in parts, here are the factors you need to consider:
How to find the humour
“Comedy is a funny way of being serious” – Peter Ustinov
The universal formula for humour and jokes involves three classic steps:
Step 1: Take the topic or subject matter and identify a particular issue within it.
Step 2: Examine that issue from a particular perspective (especially an alternative or unusual point of view).
Step 3: Take it to its extremes or find an unexpected twist within it and highlight this to amuse the audience
This technique applies to one liner jokes, or whole passages. So for instance:
Step 1, your topic may be about the Global Financial Crisis and its impact on the property market.
It’s a serious topic but you want to add some humorous touches.
Step 2: You do your preparation and research, which includes the impact on families, but for the humour you will also take a look at the issue from the point of view of the family pet dog.
Step 3: Taking this to extremes, you include lines or passages about the journey and experiences of poor Fred as he goes from lovable, overweight, Basset Hound dog sleeping in a spacious Kennel in the shaded corner of the large garden to a lean, irritable dog squeezed onto a small mat in the broom cupboard of a poky flat.
This could provide rich source material for quotes and one
How to be funny in a speech when you’re not a comedian
Comedians aren’t funny in real life.
Like any other profession, funny is what they do, not what they are.
In real life, comedians work and struggle just like the rest of us to be good at their jobs. Joan Rivers, Richard Pryor, Billy Connolly Chris Rock – all the greatest comics wrote, rewrote and rehearsed their routines with great care and diligence, using classic techniques for content and delivery to get the laughs. If you have a speech or presentation to give, and it needs to be funny throughout or more probably needs to use humour in parts, here are the factors you need to consider:
How to find the humour
“Comedy is a funny way of being serious” – Peter Ustinov
The universal formula for humour and jokes involves three classic steps:
Step 1: Take the topic or subject matter and identify a particular issue within it.
Step 2: Examine that issue from a particular perspective (especially an alternative or unusual point of view).
Step 3: Take it to its extremes or find an unexpected twist within it and highlight this to amuse the audience
This technique applies to one liner jokes, or whole passages. So for instance:
Step 1, your topic may be about the Global Financial Crisis and its impact on the property market.
It’s a serious topic but you want to add some humorous touches.
Step 2: You do your preparation and research, which includes the impact on families, but for the humour you will also take a look at the issue from the point of view of the family pet dog.
Step 3: Taking this to extremes, you include lines or passages about the journey and experiences of poor Fred as he goes from lovable, overweight, Basset Hound dog sleeping in a spacious Kennel in the shaded corner of the large garden to a lean, irritable dog squeezed onto a small mat in the broom cupboard of a poky flat.
This could provide rich source material for quotes and one