Earlier in October, I represented my Toastmasters chapter, NTU InspYre, for a district level Humorous Speech competition. Even though I’m no stranger to public speaking or debate competitions, this was really my first ever time joining a competition where your sole objective is to just make people laugh. You don’t have to inspire, you don’t have to argue but you just have to talk about something humorous that will make people laugh.

And it really was more difficult than expected. So just for the benefit of everyone, here are just 3 things I learned from my humorous speech experience!

1. When in doubt, learn from the masters

It really wasn’t easy thinking of jokes and being inexperienced with the whole process of humorous speech writing, I found myself really stuck. It really isn’t easy coming up with funny things to talk about on the fly.

So I cheated, kinda.

Just go online, look for your favorite stand-up comics and just take note of the jokes/skits that you find really funny and talk about that! Not only do you save time in deciding what exactly you want to talk about, but your speech also comes readily packaged with some pretty neat jokes!

I think this goes beyond the speech competition and is true for real life as well. For whatever you face in life, there’s definitely going to be someone who has been there and overcame the same circumstances that you face. Learning from these people can definitely give you the edge and help you achieve your goals faster.

2. Know your audience

This is absolutely vital for a humourous speech competition. Even if you have the most awesome jokes, but if you just can’t make your audience relate to your material, you’re not going to win. Humor is a highly specialized product and not everybody laughs at the same jokes. Jokes that young people can relate to are may not be the same jokes that an older audience would. So be sure to tailor your speech to the audience that you will be speaking to.

What happened to me was that I was caught talking about the show Twilight and making fun of Edward Cullen in front of an audience of older folks who probably never got caught in Twilight-mania. Obviously, that speech didn’t do as well as it did when I delivered it to a bunch of university students during one of our university Chapter Meetings.

So know your audience and prepare your jokes accordingly.

3. Give them time to laugh

For the district level competition, I was tired, pretty tense and I knew that I had quite a lot of material to cover for a 7 minute speech. I rushed through the speech, mechanically delivered the gags and at the end of the speech, I wondered why the audience didn’t laugh as much as I thought they would.

Upon review, I realised that I didn’t give them enough time to laugh. Not everyone ‘gets’ jokes at lightning speed and its not really that polite to laugh when the speaker is speaking. So give your audience some time to laugh. Deliberately pause after delivering a joke and let the audience laugh their hearts out before moving on with the speech.

What I did was that I delivered the joke and before the audience could appreciate the cleverness of my jokes, I moved on to the next gag, and they just didn’t have the time or mental capacity to digest it all. Your audience has to digest and understand your joke to laugh, so just give them that little bit of time to do so and you’ll see your laughs increasing!

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Hope this helps anyone that needs to prepare a humorous speech! I’ve been really busy and I can see that I’ve neglected this blog quite a bit. I guess I’ve just got to keep telling myself to press on and keep blogging, even though when I just don’t feel like it. Keep dropping by, readers and let me know if there’s anything you want to see on kevinc.net!

I’m really thinking of interviewing one of my entrepreneuial idols! You guys have any idea who that person is? Stay tuned to find out as I’ll definitely do so when I have the time!