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?
I agree that a joke up front is just awkward. Of course, this doesn’t mean that you can’t be lighthearted. I love to open in a conversational tone that lets people know I am comfortable/confident already and they don’t have to take care of me.
I once saw a German CEO open with a long joke. I was mortified but it may have been culturally normal. Later he tripped off the back of the stage. Now, that got laughs. I think the same advice could hold true for swearing and sex. It can be a great tool but only with the right audience. Thanks Nick!
Hi, Denise —
Thanks for the comment. I love that you start “in a conversational tone” — having a conversation with the audience is what it’s all about. And thanks for the story about the German CEO. Pratfalls do work in more than one country:-)
Hi Nick,
The Career Clinic vignette is a one-minute outtake of the talk show, and in a recent installment I related this story…
“The comedian Drake Witham used to work for a guy who told him, ‘I don’t see color. I don’t care if you’re white, black, or purple.’ And he thought, ‘Purple? Really? You don’t care if someone’s purple? Because that’s going to set off some alarm bells for me.’ Drake doesn’t know if anyone would ever be foolish enough to put him in a position to hire people. But let’s say it happens. If he has the choice between a white guy and a black guy and a purple guy, he’s definitely not going to hire the purple guy. ‘Everyone knows,’ Drake says, ‘that purple people are lazy.'”
And guess what? I heard from someone who was offended. I’m pretty sure she wasn’t purple, but she certainly cured me of taking any chances with humor!
Maureen
Maureen —
Great to hear from you and THANKS for the hilarious story. Glad to know that the purple people lobby is still going strong:-)
I teach presentation skills to engineers and tech professionals, and there’s an arena that can use a little levity! I encourage them, rather than to tell jokes, to listen for humor around them and incorporate it into their presentations. It’s often easy to discover humor by listening to children. They’re unintentionally funny, and no one is offended.
Example: I was at an outlet mall a few months ago, and a man was trying to get a soda from the machine, but it kept rejecting his dollar. Next to him, his daughter (about four years old) was watching intently as the machine spit out the dollar repeatedly. Finally she said, quite matter-of-factly and in a big voice, “Guess your money’s no good here!” Everyone in earshot cracked up.
I tell my students that they could use a story like this and link it to their topic. To a business client whose payment was overdue: “His money was no good there, perhaps, but yours is good here, and you don’t need to worry we won’t accept it.”
Hi, Susan —
Good to hear from you. Thanks for the comment and the story. You’re absolutely right; the best humor comes naturally from the situations you encounter, rather than one-liners.