The Short Self-Promotion Business Speech

Continued from the previous page:
Promoting and Publicizing Your Business Speech

 Making Your Business Speech Funny

George:
Let’s go back to the humor subject for a minute because that’s one thing that always freaks people out a little bit. They say that people are used to having funny speakers and I’m not funny. I’m not a comedian. I guess I would ask you where did you find the humor that you use in your presentations?

Patricia:
Well it’s not from a joke book. I really can’t tell jokes. My family tells me just simply not to. I’m the straight man of the family. They can always hit me with these lines and I never get it. 

George: 

My experience is the jokes in a presentation generally don’t go over well. You always hear that you should start every presentation with a joke. I think whoever started that rumor really meant was to start a presentation with humor if you can. 

Humorous stories are much better than jokes because it’s hard to make a joke relevant sometimes. And very often the joke will just fall flat on its face.  But if you tell a story and you can make that story relevant and throw in a couple of one liners throughout the story, that in my experience has been a lot more effective than just pulling some joke out of the air just to see if you can get people warmed up and laughing a little bit.  Because very often, they don’t laugh.

Patricia: 

I found that to be my experience too. As I said, my family and friends have always told me just to stay away from joke telling.  So I try to make that a policy. 

If I do tell a story sometimes I try to tell it on me because people seem to appreciate the humility that goes with telling a story on yourself.

George: 
That of course goes back to what they call self deprecating humor.  I don’t know if it applies as much if you’re doing a lunch presentation in front of the Rotary or the Kiwanis or some other civic club. But if you’re doing a paid presentation you have something of an aura about you when you get up there and it really helps to poke a little fun at yourself. It puts the audience more at ease and it’s just a great technique for getting the audience on your side from the very beginning.

Patricia: 

I found that to be the case and people want to relate to you as a human being and not as a cold mechanical instructor.

George: 
Of course you have a double challenge being an attorney

Patricia: 
Well that’s indeed the case. I usually do a little bit on the attorney side and explain that for example that sometimes we use Latin.  I’ll define a Latin term for them and explain that’s because lawyers like to feel very, very special because we can use these words that other people don’t know what they mean.

But the humor comes from the situations, from a play on words, or from turning something upside down. 

When your topic is death and taxes you really do need an off beat sense of humor.  Otherwise you’re going to be just too depressed to work.  It’s difficult to explain but after you’ve gotten a group of people in front of you it’s easy to play with them and to play with words with them.

George: 
Yeah, you found that to be important too.  I guess that bit of audience interaction is really important.

Patricia: 
Oh yes. And my speaking engagements make me so anxious I can’t relax and go to sleep.  I have to be up for awhile kind of bouncing off the walls.

George: 

I guess one of the things you found too if you do any kind of speaking at all is that you remember the stuff that is successful and you use it again.  The stuff that’s not so successful--even if it’s just mediocre--eventually starts to get weeded out. 

But the key is to do so many presentations that you find out what works with everybody and what only works with half or only works with a quarter of the audience. You keep the best stuff and start weeding out the rest.

Patricia: 
Well you’re exactly right.

As an example: I do a piece about community property because we are a community property state here. I sometimes talk about divorce and I tell the audience that in Texas we have not an “equal division of property” but a “just and right division of property.” Of course, that means the wife gets all of the assets and the husband gets all of the debt.

Well this line works really well if you have a bunch of men in the audience--preferably divorced men because they all think it’s great.

George: 

They can relate

Patricia: 
That’s right. But if you just have women in the class--and that happens occasionally--it really doesn’t fly.  So I don’t use it.

George: 

Yeah, I’ve had that experience too because in some of my presentations I tell a story about a coaches wife who had gone into labor and she’s going through all sorts of agony and pain in the delivery.

The final line of the story is how the coach leans over and says, “Just remember sweetheart…no pain, no gain.  At which point she smacks him upside the head. 

I tell that in a group of women and it brings down the house and of course I play it out a little bit longer and use some rhetorical techniques and some humor techniques. But I told it once in a group of men. There was dead silence.

Patricia: 
They just don’t get it.

George: 

Just don’t get it.  It was like they were thinking, “Oh what’s so funny about that?”

Do you find that humor comes from unexpected places sometimes?

Patricia: 
Well indeed it does.  The humor part comes from people.  The practice of law is pretty dull all by itself. But in the casebooks--the court cases that are published and printed--oh it’s amazing what the people will do.  It just really can be very funny and you can take those stories which are out there in public and convert them for your own use.

Next page: Making Your Speech Informative