Recently, the subject of using humor with large audiences was a discussion topic on some online public speaking forums I visited. Thus inspired, for this feature article I decided to do a brief review of a book in my professional library devoted solely to the subject, Tom Antion’s Wake ‘em Up: How to Use Humor and Other Professional Techniques to Create Alarmingly Good Business Presentations.
This book is loaded with funny stories about how humor can and has been used by the author and his contemporaries in business presentations and gives general advice on how to develop public speaking skills. However, there were five points made that seemed especially relevant for the new to moderately experienced public speaker wishing to inject more humor into their presentations.
1) Don’t try to use humor in early morning meetings or presentations. People aren’t awake enough to laugh.
2) Assess your “humor risk” before you decide whether or not to use humor. For example, when speaking to a group of your own employees, they’re bound to laugh at just about anything you say, so they’re low risk. On the other hand, when speaking to a group of CEOs from your industry, you may not have the same results!
3) Develop a repertoire of ad libs in advance to deliver when something goes wrong during your presentation.
Example 1: the microphone squeals, so you reply, “If you think that’s bad, wait till I start singing.”
Example 2: you trip on your way to the lectern, catch yourself and quip, “I also do magic tricks.”
4) Collect humorous information from the media or daily life and jot it down to save in a file for review and later use as humorous story in a future presentation.
5) A semi-circular seating layout is best for humor. Laughter travels faster around a room when people can easily see others laughing to their left or right.
Last but not least, if you do make a joke during your presentation and nobody laughs, move on quickly and don’t give up on humor! (That’s from Lily.)
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