Keeping your Audience Awake
There is no better feeling than making a whole group of people laugh. This is something I constantly strive to do on a day to day basis. I won’t sit here and say I’m funny, but I try to be. One of my goals is to translate humor into my presentations in a way that will help keep my audience interested and awake.
I attempted this in my freshman year of high school in one of my first presentations as a student, and although I got some laughs from the class, my teacher did not appreciate the comment I made:
My best friend Rick and I had to do a presentation on “Catching Fire”, the second book of “The Hunger Games” series. So on the first slide, there was a picture of Suzanne Collins, the author. Here’s where my nervous antics kicked in and I said this: “This is the author of our book, Suzanne Collins. And, uh, if you look at her she’s, pretty ugly…” My friend just looked at me like “What the hell are you saying dude.” My failed attempt at cracking a joke actually cost us 5 points on the project, as my teacher was appalled at what came out of my mouth.
This presentation could have gone a whole lot better if I came across this blog post from SpeakerHub, “5 Tips on using humor to engage your audience”. In this blog, they explain a few pointers in adding humor to your presentation in order to keep the audience awake. Here are those 5 tips:
- Incorporate it naturally:
- Make them relevant to your point, theme, or story
- Customize your jokes to your audience
- Always avoid offensive humor
- Do your cultural research
Clearly, I just completely ignored tip #4 during my presentation, and that comment messed me up for the next five minutes of speaking. My next attempt with a presentation will most likely be coming in this class, and so my goal is to get at least 2–3 jokes out hopefully resulting in some laughs. When preparing what I am going to be saying I will be sure to result back to this list of tips, as this is a great start for incorporating humor into your presentation and keeping your audience from falling asleep.
References:
SpeakerHub. (2017, April 17). 5 Tips on using humor to engage your audience — Medium. Retrieved March 05, 2018, from https://medium.com/@speakerhubHQ/5-tips-on-using-humor-to-engage-your-audience-13dab4c02e31
