Should you start a speech with a joke?
How to start a speech? Should you use a joke? The answer to that question is coming right up. Stay tuned.
Hi, I’m Rick Olson, founder of afunnieryou.com. When it comes to starting your speech or presentation with a joke, it’s an area where there’s a lot of general and vague advice. Should you start with a joke? Yes, you should, but a lot of the experts online say you shouldn’t.
Oh they love humor, but for some reason jokes are from the devil. I read this piece of advice online that instead of telling jokes, you should use gentle, self-deprecating humor, which leads me to my first issue with most of the advice you see online, and that is this word you keep using, “I don’t think it means what you think it means.”
I mentioned this in my last video about jokes in general and for some reason, most experts don’t really understand what a joke is. If you look it up, type in “Define: joke” into Google, look it up on webstersdictionary.com, and you’ll see that a joke is pretty much anything that makes people laugh. One of my favorite quotes is, “The clarity with which you define something determines its usefulness.”
Let’s define a joke for what it is, and the best definition that I found, the one I like the most is in one of Gene Perret’s books. “Anything that makes people laugh. A joke can be a series of words, an action, a reaction. It can even in certain instances be strategic silence. The joke is the building block of humor.”
What are these well-meaning experts talking about when they say don’t start with a joke? I really don’t know, but my guess is they’re talking about street jokes or jokes you look up on the internet, jokes that you hear people tell all the time, did you hear the one about or two guys go into a bar, but a joke is anything that makes people laugh, which leads me to my second issue with most of the advice you see online, making a distinction between jokes and humor.
I already shared with you the definition of a joke from Gene Perret’s book. A joke is the building block of humor. There is no difference between humor and a joke. Making that distinction actually just leads to inaction because it causes confusion.
Should you just start a speech or presentation with a joke? Absolutely you should, and here’s why. James Altucher, he says,
“Start off with a joke. This is a must. People need to laugh within the first 30 seconds or else you’re going to be back in your cubicle at the pencil factory and they will never remember you. I spend at least one or two hours before the talk coming up with the first joke because I know that’s what starts off the good feelings for the rest of the talk.”
Yes, you should start off with a joke, but what if you’re not funny? Well, that’s where afunnieryou.com and I come in. My goal is to help you cut through the vague general piece of advice you find online, cut through those vagularities. Help you understand the real skills of being funny, adding humor to speeches and presentations so that you can get more laughs and you can be a funnier you.
If you want more information, you can click here, or actually it’s probably over here. You can click there, and download my Public Speaker’s Guide to Humor. I demystify humor, show you how to generate humor. Jump over to afunnieryou.com, pick up a copy for yourself.
I look forward to seeing you progress on the journey to a funnier you.