Crafting a Humorous Speech

Unless a person is naturally witty, it is challenging to craft a humorous speech. And even then, it is not an easy thing to do.  However, we can consider the technicalities of humour, and draft the parameters of what constitutes a humorous speech, and more importantly, a winning one.  It would not do if the only person who finds it funny is the speaker.

In general, whilst we may have this habit of sprinkling sarcasm and irony in our speeches, by themselves, they may not be accessible to a wider audience, and cannot, by themselves, build a humorous speech.  We require one or both of the two other major elements of humour: hyperbole and misdirection.

The first thing to remember is that a humorous speech, particularly in a Toastmasters context, is distinct from stand-up comedy.  We are not telling a series of anecdotes which may or may not revolve around a theme.  We are not performing a roast, which is a series of witty insults, which is culturally specific.  Like any speech, this is about bringing the audience on a journey, and relating a story that has lessons and experiences which resonate with them.  The speaker persona still channels the audience.

We begin crafting the speech by deciding on the outline of a story.  The best source of materials is always our personal experiences.  We are the experts of ourselves, and no one can say we are wrong, or challenge our credibility there.  The irony of humorous speeches is that the best material is found in our most painful memories, our personal tragedies, our loss.  Humour is part of our coping mechanism.  It is no coincidence that the best comedians speak from pain, and sometimes suffered conditions as diverse as depression, bullying, and loss on a scale normally people may not comprehend.  To them, comedy is life, it is therapy, it is validation.  Even the mildest comedy comes from a place of discomfort.  There is no humour in self-satisfaction, only gloating, and the audience reacts negatively to that.  Petty revenge on the other, is vicariously cathartic.

The next step is to fill in the details.  Many people would find it a challenge to see the jokes, and craft the punchlines here.  That should not be the concern.  The story has to be congruent.  This is where you work out the introduction of the premise, the story, and the call to action.  In that sense, it is no different from writing a normal speech.  It is important that a humorous speech be short.  If the time is five to seven minutes, the material should be at least a minute or more less than that, since the magic of a humorous speech is in the delivery.

Once that is done, this is the part where we look at the speech, and tweak the words, working in the elements of humour.  The easiest, and lowest hanging fruit is to play on words.  A master of this was the late George Denis Patrick Carlin.  Much of his material was built on the incongruity of word play, and how, when we think about it, language and rhetorical devices are absurd.  The mastery of Carlin, however, is that he did not stop at rhetorical absurdism.  He demonstrated, through his material, that words matter, and how we are thought to say certain things have shaped our views on certain issues.  He then expounded and expanded on this to the wider tragedy that the masses of humanity are willing victims of the political systems we put in place above us.  In this, even as we laugh, we think, and there is that call to action there.

A second type of humour, and this was the forte of masters such as Julius Henry “Groucho” Marx, was misdirection humour.  Misdirection humour subverts our expectations of the story.  This may involve transposing the protagonist and the antagonist, the hero and villain, or simply upending our expectations.  “Groucho” Marx passed away of pneumonia on the 19^th August 1977.  In his obituary, The New York Times wrote, “He developed the insult into an art form.”

Finally, the easiest way to inject humour into a speech is hyperbole, or exaggeration.  This can be mild, for comic effect, or it can be stretched until it becomes satire.  The art of the satire is to stretch the credulity of the audience without breaking it.  At the end of the speech, the audience must have that sense of disbelief, wondering if the story was real.

This process of injecting humour into a crafted speech goes through several drafts and iterations.  The speaker must note how he should sound at various points of the story.  There is a stronger emphasis on vocal variety, and connecting to the audience.  The audience must feel that they are part of the story, either as unwilling witnesses, hapless bystanders, or even co-conspirators.  At some points, it massages the ego of the audience when they feel they are in on the joke, and then misdirection is applied to subvert this, so that they can laugh at themselves.  A quip published in 1937, and mistakenly attributed to Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill goes, “Diplomat: A person who can tell you to go to hell in such a tactful way that you will look forward to making the trip.”  To paraphrase that here, a humour is the ability to insult people in such a way that they laugh at themselves.

Within all that, the best way to deflect criticism and audience pushback is for the speaker to be the vicarious sacrifice, utilising his speaker persona to be the willing victim of the joke.  This is the essence of self-deprecating humour.  It makes it easier for people to laugh at themselves when they think they are laughing at others first.  An ideal scenario is for that dawning realisation to be worked into the call to action.

The final element of delivering a humorous speech is the relentless practice.  For Toastmasters, what they can do is use the airtime of chapter meetings, even during the table topics segment or delivering a project evaluation, to test out punchlines.  This allows the speaker to hone the material, one part at a time, and the delivery, without revealing the entire speech until it is time to deliver it.

One of the considerations in speech delivery that is often neglected is to pause after a punchline.  These pauses add up, and that it why we need to leave time for it.  The right deployment of pauses elevates the humour.  Body language, exaggerated hand gestures, even rolling of the eyes – these are the visual elements of humour that enhance a speech.

Ultimately, humour is an ongoing experiment of experiential living.  People want to laugh, they want to be entertained, and they want to feel good.  Instead of being intimidated, I encourage people to go out, and try to be funny.  At the very worst, people will laugh at you.