How should I use humor?

Humor in a presentation is a good thing, because if you get audience members to laugh, you now know the following 10 things are true:

1. They were listening to you and not sleeping!
2. They understood you.
3. They processed what you said.
4. They liked what you said.
5. They are communicating back to you in the form of laugher.
6. You likely said something unexpected.
7. You aren’t boring them.
8. Because you aren’t boring them, they like you more.
9. They aren’t diving to their cell phones to check email this second.
10. You have brightened their day.

So yes, humor is a good thing, but there are some dangers to avoid when attempting humor. Beware of these pitfalls:

1. If you start your speech with a “joke,” you lose the war on being unexpected, because too many people are expecting it then.
2. Don’t tell canned or generic jokes. If you sound like you are trying to be a comedian, then people will compare you to professional comedians they watch on TV every day and you will lose in comparison.
3. The sensitivity police are everywhere. Make sure your humor won’t be interpreted as you being a mean, nasty, negative, insensitive monster.
4. Your humor needs to have a point to it, otherwise you will be seen as another amateur comedian
5. Never preface a joke by saying “Let me tell you a funny joke…” If you do this, you destroy the quality of surprise, plus, the audience wants to decide for themselves if the joke is funny.
6. Never preface a funny story by saying “let me share with you a funny story…” (see reasons above) In fact, don’t even tell people you are telling a story. Just tell the story. People will figure it out that it is a story.
7. Never feel like you have to be funny unless you are a paid comedian.
8. Don’t look rejected if the audience doesn’t laugh when you think they should laugh.
9. Don’t berate he audience for not laughing.
10. Don’t seem like you are trying to be funny.

After all that, it doesn’t seem like I’ve given you a lot of options for using humor in your presentations. Not true! You still have many options.

The best thing for most presenters to do is to retell stories that happened to them that were funny at the time and that still seem funny when you say them again. If your stories and anecdotes are personal, then your humor will be authentic.

Plus, if you are making fun of yourself, no one gets offended and you seem like a class act for being able to poke fun at yourself.

A part of the beauty of humor is that is really increases your audiences’ ability to remember you and your messages. I still remember the North Carolina Secretary of State Thad Eure giving a speech to me and hundreds of other high school students at an American Legion Boys State convention in 1980. Eure was speaking to a bunch of boys who would soon be freshmen in college. He started off “I still remember when I was a freshman in college (he was in his 80s at the time), all the upperclassmen were nice enough to call me Freshman Eure (pronounced ‘fresh manure’)” As you can imagine, that went over very well in a convention hall full of teenage boys.

As a presenter, you shouldn’t try to get a big belly laugh every ten seconds the way a comedian attempts to do, but there is no reason why you can’t steal an effective trick from comedians. If you ever go to comedy clubs, you will see many comedians bring a recording device up to the stage with them. What they are doing is recording their act and then listening to it to see what parts got the biggest laughs and what parts fell flat.

You can do the same. Audio record your presentations and then listen to what generated laughs. Then you can make notes to use that element again and again, as long as it fits with your message and your audience hasn’t heard it recently.

As a presenter, your goal is to communicate messages to get people to act, not to serve as a court jester. But, if you can make people laugh, get them to like you and have them remember some of your messages through the use of humor, you will be way ahead of the competition.