On the 12th of September 2019,
I served as Contest Toastmaster of the Day at AIA Toastmasters Club’s Humorous
Speech and Evaluation Contest. Humorous
speech contests have a reputation problem.
Most people assume comedy is the easy category, a light-hearted breather
between the serious International Speech and Table Topics disciplines. That assumption is wrong, and this contest
proved it decisively. Landing a laugh on
command, in front of judges scoring you on structure as much as reaction, is
considerably harder than delivering an earnest five-minute argument about
leadership. Nobody claps politely for a
joke that fails.
Iris Zhuo served as Contest Chair. Joy Chow served as Creative Director. Fion Yong was photographer. The Sergeants-at-Arms were Mandy Poon, Yeo
Jing Xian, April Lin, and Frances Goh. Kris
Martis delivered the test speech.
The Humorous Speeches, & Why Each
One Worked
Cindy Gan argued her way into becoming a
dictator, tracing her logic back through the Dynamic Leadership Pathway with
the kind of twisted internal consistency that makes a bad argument land as
brilliant comedy. She had the sass to
carry it, and I doubt anyone else in the room could have made authoritarianism
sound this charming.
Ivan Lee, DTM, recounted arriving late to
a wedding, and only later discovering it was the wrong wedding entirely, which
left him mid-ceremony attempting to retrieve his hong bao from
strangers. The moral wrote itself:
confirm the venue before you hand over money to people you have never met.
Jack Sia drew his material from a friend
fifty years into marriage, mining five decades of accumulated wisdom for laughs
rather than platitudes.
Linda Lee built her speech around the
indignities of an ageing body, informing the room that certain things were no
longer firm, but rather hanging here and there, her biceps, delivered as a
masterclass in misdirection humour that had the room laughing before they
realised where the joke was actually going.
Humorous Speech Best Speaker went to Linda
Lee, with Cindy Gan as first runner-up.
The Evaluation Contest fielded Linda Lee,
Eric Tan, DTM, Ivan Lee, DTM, and Jack Sia.
Eric Tan, DTM, took Best Speaker, with Linda Lee as first runner-up and
Ivan Lee, DTM, as second runner-up.
Research on public speaking consistently
shows that audiences retain content delivered through structured humour,
callbacks, self-deprecation, and misdirection considerably longer than content
delivered flatly, precisely because the comic structure forces the brain to
actively process the misdirection before the punchline lands. Every speaker on that stage was doing something
more technically demanding than reciting facts persuasively. They were engineering laughter on a schedule,
in front of judges scoring the mechanism as closely as the reaction. Linda Lee’s hanging biceps did not happen by
accident. They happened because someone
understood where the misdirection needed to sit, and executed it without
hesitation. That is a considerably
harder skill than most conference keynote speakers will ever bother to learn.
Terence Nunis, DTM
| Division Advisor, District 80 Division M | Club Advisor, AIA Toastmasters |
Past President & Founder, Awesome Toastmasters
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