What is humor from a speech perspective?

Humor is the entity in your speech that creates laughter, amusement, or smile. One of the key ways to entertain an audience is by leveraging the power of humor in your speech.

Humor is the way of saying things in your speech, the way you percieve things, or the way you as a speaker think about your subject.

When it comes to creating humor, you can take two paths.

One is to find jokes from a joke book or internet and modify it to suit your speech. You’ll be adding hashed out stories that your audience have already a billion times. Of course, you might have new characters.

The other path is to uncover, create, and convey your content in a way that will create laughter, amusement, or smile for your audience.

Which path should you take?

Holding the flag of common sense and trying to be politically right, you might say, “Of course, second path.”

But you are WRONG.

It was a trick question.

The RIGHT answer is: both the paths are right.

It’ll all be clear in a minute.

If you take the first path, one day some audience member would definitely come near you, whisper in your ears or shout out loud, “I have heard that story before. Did you take it from internet?”

That will really suck.

And you’ll be like, “Now, I believe in the second path.”

See…. you eventually took the right path.

In the question, you focused on “which path” and I focussed on “take.”

That’s the power of PERCEPTION!

How each of one us see the same thing from different angles.

And PERCEPTION is a powerful device to create humor.

If you are able to laugh at something from your own life experiences, you can transform that as laughter matter for your audience as well.

Before I show how to use PERCEPTION to create humor, you need to understand the structure of a “laugh line.”

Structure of a “laugh line”

Any laugh line or (humor content) will follow the below formula.

Premise + Pause + Punch + Pause = Laughter

Let us understand it with a laugh line.

People exaggerate that parents in India, pressure their children to only become a doctor or an engineer. That’s not true. They don’t just pressure. They blackmail.

Below, you can watch the delivery of this laugh line.

Let us breakdown the laugh line into its essential elements.

“People exaggerate that parents in India, pressure their children to only become a doctor or an engineer. That’s not true. They don’t just pressure. <Pause 1> They blackmail <Pause 2>.”

1. Premise: The underlined part is the premise. Premise is the information needed for audience to understand or appreciate your joke. In our example, the premise is “People exaggerate that parents in India, pressure their children to only become a doctor or an engineer. That’s not true. They don’t just pressure”. Premise should do two things. It should be:

a) True or at least believable.You see, this statement“People exaggerate that parents in India, pressure their children to only become a doctor or an engineer” is completely true as well as believable. The audience is able to relate because they also might have parents who might have asked them to get into a profession.

b) Lead them in one direction. Now, we want to take the audience in one direction (so that we can surprise them later). In order to do that, I said, “That’s not true. They don’t just pressure”. Now, audience is thinking that I am going to say something positive about Indian parents.

2. Pause 1: This is needed to build the tension. The job of this pause is to heighten the suspense.
3. Punch: Punch is the word or set of words that will actually trigger the laughter. The function of the Punch is to surprise the audience by saying something contrary to the audience’s expectation. Here, the punch is “They blackmail”. The laughter is a result of the release of tension built up in the premise and the pause.
4. Pause 2: This is to give time for the audience to laugh. Many speakers do not pause here. If you do not pause, you will be stamping on the laughter.

If you can identify the premise and punch for your story and follow the principles that are given above, you’ll be able to create humor. Let me explain further.

Uncover humor from your story using “Perspective”

Here’s an incident that happened during my 9th grade.

We got our exam results. I got fifteenth rank. My classmate Vivek got fifth rank. Classmates started discussing ranks. I was feeling ashamed of my rank. I didn’t want to be judged.

This is what happened.

Just a flat retelling of what happened is NOT going to create humor.

And your speech will become boring.

The audience wants to know it from YOUR perspective.

This is very important because stories need to have different perspectives to make them interesting and entertaining.

When you start saying things from different and unique perspectives, you’ll create humor.

Again, not all stories can be given perspective to create humor.

That’s why you need to be smart about selecting the topic when you want to create a humorous speech

A speech (usually keynote or any speech given in a ball-room fashion) is mostly made up of stories. And stories are the easiest pathway to leverage the power of humor. I want  to share how PERSPECTIVE can used as a tool to uncover humor from your story.

Focus on a specific point in the story from different angles and provide an opinion through the eyes of a character present in the scene from a first person, second person or third person perspective.

Now, if you are part of the scene in the story, say what you were thinking. Tell us what the other characters were thinking. Tell us what you were thinking about the other characters.

When you start doing this perspective exercise, you’ll get tons of ideas to help you create the twist required to create laughs.

Let us see how this concept was used in my speech. Here’s the “what happened” part of the story:

That day—we got our results for our midterm exams. Vivek got fifth rank and I got fifteenth.

This seems straightforward and clear. To illustrate from my perspective during that experience, I saw my character from the third person point of view.

In this case, the character was feeling sad because his classmates would underestimate him because he scored a poor rank. The character didn’t want to be judged this way, as is the case with the majority of people. No one really wants to be judged.

Hence, I shared my perspective as the speaker, and then shared the perspective of me as the character.

Always keep anticipating how an audience will be reacting when forming perspectives. Then, communicate that perspective in a way that follows the structure of a laugh line.

These are the exact lines I used:

Not surprising but depressing. Why? My classmates will think I am dumb which I am, not.

Observe that I moved into the present tense to share my perspective. This helped me connect better. “Depressing” is a strong word that I used to set my context in an exaggerated way. Now, the below acts as the punches:

My classmates will think I am dumb <pause> which I am <pause> not <pause>

I love the above sentence because it came after a lot of rewriting. I got a laugh at each of those pauses.

This laugh line is an advanced application where I combine a lot of devices. However, perspective is the main device.  But if you dig deep, I have used the devices of empathy, self-deprecation, contrast, modified rule of three to create this laugh line.

If you are interested to learn more about the other devices, check out “Connect Using Humor and Story: How I got 17 laughs, 3 applauses in a 7 minute persuasive speech.

Here’s the simple cheatsheet on what is humor and how to uncover humor in your speech.

1) Humor is what creates amusement, laughter or smile in your audience.
2) Understand the laugh lines structure,
3) Form perspectives of your story that can fit the laugh line structure, and BOOM,

You have created humor in your speech!