Using Humor

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Using humor in your speech or presentation can give you many benefits. It can help warm up an audience to you. It can show them that you’re interesting and they should be ready for anything. It can also help you relax by setting a tone of fun and that you’re interesting to listen to.

However, humor can also work against you, if it’s not used correctly. If your humor is not received well, then it can have the effect of making you more nervous. It can even turn your audience off from wanting to listen to you.

The best type of humor to use is self-deprecating, that is – making fun of yourself. Think about your audience and your topic. Then, think of a funny story that is related to the topic. You can even make something up. Just use yourself as the target of the humor. This will avoid singling out anyone group or person in the audience and people will see that you’re comfortable with yourself. If you make something up, you can even admit to it after for even more laughs. Don’t use foul language or dirty jokes. It will not go well no matter what the occasion. Stick to “G” or “PG” rated and you will do well.

Here are some things that humor can do for you!

1. Humor helps you connect with your audience. Make yourself more relatable with your audience as they begin to see that it’s not all about the information. Humor draws your audience to you because people are naturally drawn to positive things.

2. Humor makes you more approachable and likeable as a speaker. Your audience will see you as being more down to earth and again, relatable.

3. Humor creates interest in your topic as well as yourself. Humor just makes things interesting to follow. People like to laugh.

4. Humor helps to keep the attention of your audience. Your audience tunes out because they get lost in your presentation. By using humor, it’ll be harder for your audience to tune out because they will want to hear your humorous story.

5. Humor strengthens point and ideas you want to highlight in your presentation. Funny stories are memorable and can strengthen the point of your message. Television sitcoms are famous for taking real life situations and presenting them in a humorous fashion.

6. Humor removes hostility in your presentation. If there were any ill feelings towards you or your message, humor lightens the mood of your audiences and disarms negative emotions.

7. Humor helps connects pieces of information in your topic. Work humor into the transition points of your presentation. In that way they will be the bridge that connects the points of your message together.

8. Humor helps paint mental images in the minds of your audience. Self-effacing humor is often relatable to your audience because they can see themselves having those same situations.

9. Humor makes your presentation more memorable. People remember when they laugh. They’ll remember funny stories or funny instance during your presentation.

10. Humor lightens a heavy topic. People can only take so much of heavy topics. You don’t want to make your audience feel depressed even if your topic discusses a very grave matter.

11. Humor can bring in better evaluations and more product sales. Humor warms your audience up to you. In doing so, your audience will be more open to purchasing your back of the room products as well as give you a better review.

12. Humor will make people happy. People want to enjoy your seminar. They want to have a good time and they want to be happy. Humor helps you achieve that.

Humor can add so much variety to an otherwise dull, information only presentation. Helping to connect you with your audience, humor is a great addition that can bring you better speaker reviews and increased revenue. Add some spice to your message by incorporating humor!

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