Humor in speeches

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Speaking to Inspire: Ceremonial and Motivational Speeches

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University of Washington

Speaking to Inspire: Ceremonial and Motivational Speeches

25 ratings

Course 4 of 4 in the Specialization Dynamic Public Speaking

The most memorable speeches inspire, entertain, and praise. By blending stories and eloquence, great speeches highlight the core values motivating an audience. You might need to do this in a keynote address, a eulogy, or simply a business meeting. Inspiring audiences is a common, but difficult writing challenge. You want a speech that elevates the topic and the audience. This course gives you a method for preparing and delivering speeches that inspire and entertain. By the end of this course, you should be able to compose and deliver moving speeches that praise core audience values through evidence, storytelling, and humor. You should be able to write eloquent passages in tones appropriate to the audience and occasion and speak fluidly from either a well-prepared manuscript or from memory. Learners will record speeches, providing and receiving peer feedback.

From the lesson

Week 4. Remembering and delivering a great speech.

You have your manuscript, now let’s perform it. Memory and delivery are clearly linked. We need to decide whether we’ll extemporize the speech, work from a manuscript, or memorize the whole thing. No one approach is inherently better, but should be a good response to the rhetorical situation. We’ll talk about making this decision. Now we can finally get into some humor work. Some of this is certainly invention, but a lot of it is delivery. We’ll think about where and how to insert some humor into our speeches. And just as important, what to do when a joke falls flat. We’ll wrap up with some general delivery and performance issues. The assignment this week is a speech analysis. You’ll watch a speech, write up some feedback, and read how others analyzed the speech.

Humor in speeches6:46

Integrating humor8:08

What humor do I leave in? What do I take out?4:31

A failed joke is your best opportunity5:44

Meet the Instructors

Dr. Matt McGarrity
Principal Lecturer
UW Department of Communication

Humor is a universal in the human experience.

And you might feel like, "Oh I'm really not all that funny."

But you are by like genetic inheritance.

Humor occurs in all human cultures and even in non-human ones.

So way back Charles Darwin talked about chimpanzee laughter and we still see this.

The primate researcher Roger Fouts taught sign language to the chimpanzee Washoe.

So anyway, one day Washoe standing next to him and sounding funny.

You know funny, funny, funny.

Now Fouts didn't know what it means.

And then he looks down he sees Washoe peeing on his leg, right.

That to Washoe was funny.

Wonderful kids, right?

They're all the same regardless of species.

But it's not all that surprising.

Laughter in humans and chimps probably has

the same evolutionary origins and it performs many of the same social functions.

Humor is a type of social play.

It allows for us to interact with one another in a playful manner.

And because of this, it fosters social bonding.

So that's great, that's wonderful.

What is humor? What's funny?

Well, there is a ton of research on humor and it's very helpful.

But it is important to remember Mark Twain.

Why? He said, "Explaining humor is a lot like dissecting a frog.

You learn a lot in the process,

but in the end you kill it."

So in this video,

we're going to talk a little bit about speech humor.

And then we're going to talk about how to integrate

it into our speeches over the next few videos.

So, let's go back to that original question, what is humor?

Well, Rod Martin is a psychologist who studies humor.

And in one of his major works,

he divides the humor process into four components.

So to begin with, there's a social context.

So humor most commonly happens with others.

So we might find something funny privately but humor is really a social action.

What else? There's a cognitive perceptual process.

So this is really the core of what makes something funny.

How do we cognitively perceive something as humorous?

Now the essence of humor, according to psychologists,

seems to be incongruity,

unexpectedness combined with playfulness.

So we perceive two contradictory ideas simultaneously.

And then Martin in fact includes a joke to explain this.

I like it.

So two cannibals are sitting there eating a clown.

One turns to the other and says,

"Does this taste funny to you?"

Okay, that's funny, that's funny.

Okay, it's unexpected and it's playful.

Now using a rubber chicken.

All right, that isn't really funny anymore.

Okay, it's hacky, it's no longer unexpected.

It's a dead joke. Gets a little funny.

So there's a social context,

then a cognitive process and then there's an emotional aspect.

So when we laugh,

we experience an emotion.

We don't often think about it that way,

but experiencing humor is an emotion.

It's like anger or fear.

Now you could call this emotion joy.

Rod Martin calls it mirth.

And so that means when we include humor in our speeches,

we're building in spots of pleasurable emotion for the audience. And that's pretty huge.

Okay, so we've got social,

we've got cognitive, we've got emotional.

And finally, we've got behavioral expression, laughter.

So we automatically laugh when we find something funny.

And the sound of laughter is universal in humans.

Children born deaf laugh out loud and it sounds much the same way.

So that's what humor is.

How does it show up in our speeches?

How does it show up in everyday life?

Well, the psychologists Long and Grace created a typology of 11 basic forms of humor.

And this includes stuff like irony and satire and sarcasm and over an understatement.

Humor can be self-deprecating,

it could be teasing, double entendres and of course puns.

Now these forms of humor can be used for inclusion,

creating cohesiveness among a group or exclusion,

creating an out-group, basically making fun of someone.

Now for us as speakers,

generally we want inclusion.

Right? So we're using irony, light teasing, self-deprecation.

I think you want to think of your humor as seasoning.

We're adding some into augment our message and create a pleasurable audience experience.

And I would say that's a key point.

We're creating an audience experience.

So, when I look at humor in speeches,

when I look at humor in general,

I see it as sort of on a sliding scale.

Now on the far end we have stand up comedy, right?

That is pure humor.

And it's also really, really tough.

My grandfather was a stand up. I know stand up.

I used to do some stand up. It's exhausting.

The writing process is difficult and the threat of failure is very real.

If you're doing stand up and people aren't

laughing every couple of seconds, you're probably in trouble.

But you shouldn't worry about this because we're not doing a stand up, okay?

We're speakers with some humor.

And that is much, much easier. Okay?

So we've got stand up over there and then I would say maybe a similar category,

related category, one over is jokes.

Okay, jokes are pre-formulated. They're self-contained.

They're acontextual.

I'm not sure what the best part of living in Switzerland is,

but I know the flag is a big plus.

Okay, that's a standalone joke.

And we'll discuss this in the next video.

But I generally to avoid jokes.

If I put a joke in a speech,

it often feels a little bit forced.

So we've got stand ups, we've got jokes.

And I would say these are more comedy than they are speech.

And then me sort of crossover into the speech territory and I would say

first stop in that speech territory are anecdotes and stories.

And these are usually more personal and narrative than jokes,

and you easily integrate stories into your speeches.

Now they might be funny on their own or they

might set up a funny line. So we've got that.

And then I would say the next category over is just sort of being funny or being playful.

And honestly, this is where I try to live as a speaker,

making fun of my mistakes.

I might plan some of this out.

It's self-deprecating, but this is sometimes going to be a lot more off the fly.

And then beyond that,

when we go even further, we're into conversational humor.

And in fact researchers point out that

the vast majority of what we experience in a day is conversational humor.

Now for public speaking,

we want integrated forms of humor.

And that generally puts us in the realm of stories and being playful.

Stuff that flows organically from our speech content.

So we're going to talk about integrating humor in our next lecture.

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