Unless a person is naturally witty, a
humorous speech is hard to write. Even
then, it is not easy. We can still study
the mechanics. We can draft the
parameters of what makes a speech funny, and what makes it win. It fails if only the speaker finds it funny.
Sarcasm Alone Never Carries a Speech
Sarcasm and irony feel natural to sprinkle
in. On their own, they rarely reach a
wider audience. Sarcasm relies on tone,
and tone does not always survive translation across culture or context. A line delivered dry, meant as a joke, can
land as an insult to a listener unfamiliar with the register. A humorous speech needs one or both of the
two real engines of comedy instead: hyperbole and misdirection. Both work on the logic of the story itself,
not on tone alone, which makes them travel further across an audience with
mixed backgrounds.
This is Not Stand-Up Comedy
A Toastmasters humorous speech differs
from stand-up. It is not a string of
unrelated anecdotes. It is not a roast;
a run of witty insults tied to a specific culture. Like any speech, it takes the audience on a
journey. The speaker persona still
channels the room.
Darren LaCroix understood this distinction
better than most, because he learned it the hard way. He spent years failing as a stand-up comic in
the early 1990s, bombing so badly on video that people who later watched the
footage could barely recognise him as the same man. He did not become the 2001 World Champion of
Public Speaking, selected from over 30,000 contestants, by recycling stand-up
material. He built an entirely different
kind of speech; one built on a single sustained story rather than a string of
disconnected bits.
Why Pain Makes Better Material Than
Success
Start with personal experience. You are the expert on your own life. Nobody can challenge that credibility. The irony is this: the best material comes
from our worst memories. Personal
tragedy. Loss. Humour is a coping mechanism, and the best
comedians usually write from real pain.
LaCroix’s own championship speech, titled
simply “Ouch!”, was built directly from his comedy failure and roughly
US$120,000 in accumulated debt. He
opened with a question to the room: what do you do when you fall on your
face? Then he demonstrated it,
physically, falling to his knees and then his upper body in front of two
thousand people, lying on the ground and saying, quite literally, “Ouch.” He built the entire speech around the lesson
buried inside that failure: that progress survives the fall, provided you are
willing to risk it. Nearly two decades
later, people still study that speech.
Psychologists Dr. Albert Peter McGraw and
Dr. Caleb Warren named this mechanism the Benign Violation Theory in
2010, which they published in Psychological Science. Humour requires three things at once. A violation of how things should be. A sense that the violation is safe. Both perceptions arrive together. One of the three routes to “safe” is
psychological distance, the old line that comedy is tragedy plus time. A painful memory becomes funny once enough
distance sits between the speaker and the wound. That is not folk wisdom. It is a tested model.
Self-satisfaction produces no comedy. Only gloating, and audiences turn on gloating
fast. Petty revenge, though, lands as
cathartic, vicariously, on the audience’s behalf.
The Structure Comes before the Jokes
Fill in the details next. Most people panic here, hunting for
punchlines too early. That is the wrong
worry. Get the story congruent first:
premise, journey, call to action. It is
no different from any other speech. Keep
it short. If the slot runs five to seven
minutes, write for a minute less.
Delivery, not length, is where the magic sits.
Wordplay: The Carlin Method
Once the structure holds, tweak the
language. The easiest tool is
wordplay. George Denis Patrick Carlin,
the American comedian, built much of his act on this. Language itself, he argued, is absurd once
examined closely. Carlin’s own material
once carried legal consequences. He
debuted a routine titled “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” in May
1972. Performing it that July at
Milwaukee’s Summerfest, he was arrested and charged with violating obscenity laws. A judge threw the charge out that December,
reportedly laughing through the entire recording played in court as evidence
that Carlin’s intent was comedy, not provocation. A separate 1973 radio broadcast of a related
routine triggered a formal complaint to the Federal Communications Commission,
which escalated all the way to the Supreme Court. The Court ruled 5 to 4 in 1978, in FCC v.
Pacifica Foundation, a decision that still governs American broadcast indecency
law today. Carlin, in his own 2009 autobiography,
said he took “perverse pride” in the fact that his wordplay routine is still
taught in law schools.
Carlin did not stop at absurdism. He used it to show how the words we are
taught shape what we believe, and then widened that into a sharper point: that
most people are willing subjects of the systems ruling over them. The audience laughs. Then it thinks. That is the call to action, smuggled inside
the joke.
Misdirection: The Marx Method
Julius Henry “Groucho” Marx mastered a
second tool: misdirection. It subverts
the story the audience thinks it is hearing.
Swap hero and villain. Flip the
expected ending. Groucho Marx died of
pneumonia on 19th August 1977.
The New York Times wrote in his obituary that he “developed the insult
into an art form.”
Hyperbole: The Cheapest Tool
Hyperbole is the simplest device
available. Exaggerate lightly for comic
effect, or stretch it until it becomes satire.
Satire’s job is to stretch the audience’s credulity without snapping
it. Jonathan Swift’s 1729 essay “A
Modest Proposal,” suggesting the Irish poor sell their infant children as food
for the wealthy, remains the standard against which every satirist since has
measured that exact balance. Push too
far, and the satire reads as the literal proposal. Swift’s genius was holding the line where the
horror stayed legible as argument rather than instruction. By the end of a good satirical speech, the
audience should still wonder, briefly, if the story was real.
The Audience Needs to Feel Complicit
Every draft should test how the speaker
sounds at each turn. Vocal variety
matters here more than usual. The
audience must feel involved, as unwilling witness, bystander, or co-conspirator. Let them feel briefly clever, in on the
joke. Then use misdirection to turn the
joke back on them, so they laugh at themselves instead. A 1937 quip, wrongly credited to Sir Winston
Leonard Spencer-Churchill, put it well: a diplomat is a person who can tell you
to go to hell so tactfully that you look forward to the trip. Humour, at its best, insults people gently
enough that they laugh along.
Self-Deprecation as a Shield
The surest way to disarm criticism is to
make the speaker the target first.
Self-deprecating humour lets the room laugh at itself, because it thinks
it is laughing at someone else initially.
LaCroix’s own “Ouch!” worked on this principle. He did not present his stand-up failure as
someone else’s cautionary tale. He
presented it as his own, in full, in front of the very audience judging his
ability to recover from failure in real time.
Build that dawning realisation into the call to action, and the laugh
lands twice.
Practice Beats Talent
Humour only survives contact with
rehearsal. Toastmasters can test
material during ordinary meeting airtime, in Table Topics, in a project
evaluation, without giving away the full speech. One line at a time. One reaction at a time.
Pause after the punchline. This is the most neglected skill in
delivery. The silence does the work the
words cannot. LaCroix’s own coach, Mark L.
Brown, himself the 1995 World Champion of Public Speaking, told him to hold his
floor-fall pause considerably longer than well-meaning Toastmasters feedback
had suggested. LaCroix later credited
that single note, staying down longer than felt comfortable, as one of the
decisions that won him the championship.
Well-meaning feedback and expert coaching are not the same thing, and
the gap between them frequently sits in this kind of pause. Body language, an exaggerated gesture, a
rolled eye, all reinforce it further.
Humour is an ongoing experiment, run in
public, with real stakes. People want to
laugh. They want to feel something. Go and try.
At worst, they laugh at you instead of with you, and even that is still
a laugh.
Terence
Nunis, DTM | Division Advisor, District 80 Division M | Club Advisor,
AIA Toastmasters | Past President & Founder, Awesome Toastmasters
