I often get asked about injecting humor in speeches, and that other question, which might be summarized as “how blue can I go?” 

Let’s take humor first.  The clichéd advice is to begin your talk with a joke, ‘just to put the audience at its ease’.  That’s bulls**t.  Beginning with a joke may or may not induce a laugh from the audience, but it won’t put the audience at its ease.  The audience is already a whole lot easier than the speaker will ever be.  The real reason speakers tell jokes to start is to put themselves at ease.  If you’re getting a laugh in Minute 2, you’re going to think, ‘they love me already!’ 

Bad idea.  First of all, because you're typically full of adrenaline, especially at the beginning of a speech, there’s a danger that your mouth will move faster than the audience’s ears.  And if the joke falls flat, then everyone feels bad, and you’ve blown the opening.  Don’t put that kind of pressure on yourself.  Begin with a story, or a question that brings the audience in, or a fascinating fact. 

Of course, humor is its own defense.  If people laugh, that’s a good thing, right?  True as far as it goes.  But it doesn’t go very far.  I’ve heard many stories of speakers that told jokes the audience laughed at – and then had to deal with the complaints from the meeting planner because some person or persons in the audience was offended. 

Humor is topical, personal, aggressive, local and in your face.  That makes it inherently risky.  If the humor is funny, it’s usually at someone’s expense, and that means you’re likely to offend someone.  If the humor isn’t funny, you look stupid.  My preference is to allow your wit to play with the content in (appropriately) funny ways, rather than telling set jokes. 

The bottom line?  Know your audience.  Everyone loves to laugh – and we need laughs these days as much or more than ever – but watch out for the few that love to be offended, and to make a case out of it. 

Humor doesn’t travel well, so if you’re determined to use jokes, then do your research in advance, and make sure that your great line about rednecks will play as well in Iowa as it does in NYC.  And forget about taking a joke across country boundaries.  Humor is virtually incomprehensible from one country to another.  Even the US and the UK, the two countries I know best, laugh at very different things.   

On to sex!  Here there’s very little upside, and plenty of career-limiting downsides, to offending an audience with sexual references.  Of course, you have to judge your audience.  A church group and a squad of Marines in Afghanistan will have different attitudes toward and tolerances of blue comments.  But you also don’t want to get a reputation for making comments that might be offensive to a percentage of your potential audiences, and you don’t want sexual innuendo to get back to other audiences even if your comments were safe in front of a particular group. 

My advice?  Don’t tell an audience anything that you would blush to say to your mother, or you would mind reading on the front page of the New York Times.  Keep it clean.  Squeaky clean. 

The definition of clean varies from region to region and country to country.  Once again, the cardinal rule is Know Your Audience. 

What the people who hire speakers look for can be summarized in one word:  consistency.  They don’t want to be surprised, because in the speaking business, almost all surprises are bad ones.  If you want to be a working speaker, have that word – consistency – tattooed somewhere you can see it, and never forget it.  That’s your job.  So ask yourself, is a chuckle, or a leer, in one moment for one audience worth my reputation? 

What has been your experience?  Has humor paid off for you?  Where do you draw the blue line?