I remember the first laugh I ever got while holding a hand-held mike and telling a joke.  I felt like a stand up comic.  It was great!  I also remember the longest laugh I ever got.  It was from a saver line to a tough question and the laughter went so long I ran out of facial expressions to acknowledge the laugh.  I even remember my second biggest laugh.  Point being – creating laughter is addictive.

It’s hard to compare bringing an audience to laughter to anything else.  Olympic athlete Peter Vidmar compared his humorous presentation at a Toastmasters conference to his Gold Medal experience.

Besides feeling good, there are many reasons to use humor in your presentation:

  • It facilitates learning.
  • It makes you memorable.
  • It gets you good evaluations (translation: future gigs!).
  • You’ve made your audience happy!!!
  • You feel as if you’ve “arrived” as a speaker.

Here are a few tips to push you a little closer to adding humor to your presentations:

  1. Do something different just before or just after your punch line – slight pause, slightly different voice or pace, tilt your head, raise an eyebrow, look like the cat that just ate the canary.
  2. Try different, funny things when giving your Toastmasters speeches!  Your Toastmasters club is for practice!!!
  3. It’s OK for a speaker to be goofy at times.

If you’re not a goofy person, be a temporary goofy person.  Pretend to be a goofy person:

  • Don’t get too attached to your script so you’ll be ready for the impromptu humor, from you or your audience.
  • A failed bit of humor doesn’t mean, “Be cautious next time.” Carry on!  Dive into the next one.
  • And finally, the best (safest) place to practice impromptu humor: in the grocery checkout line.  Do it!!!  If you crash and burn, go to a different store!  It’s part of the training and gets you to your speaking goal sooner.
  • Oh, one more final thing: look confident up there

And 1 more finally, in case you haven’t heard it this week:  “Do I need to have humor in my presentation?  Only if you want to get paid.”  There – I said it.

——————-