Engaging your Audience through Humour and Storytelling

Roundtable with Scott Friedman CSP 1993

Reviewed by Christopher How

Scott mentioned that as a speaker we come from one of three places

1. Self-centric: 
2. Content-centric:
3. Audience-centric: 

Always make your presentation about your audience.

Planning your speaking engagement

1. Do not prepare the contents of your presentation for a full session
You will not have time to incorporate humour in your speech if you are trying to cover everything in your presentation. Scott advises to plan your contents to take up two-third of the session.

2. Understand your audience
When taking on a speaking engagement, ask the hirer who will be in your audience and how conservative are they. It’s fun to add humour to a presentation but it wouldn’t be fun if you are speaking to a conservative crowd who gets offended by your jokes. If you understand your audience and know how they are feeling, you can make use of a commonality that everyone shares and really connect with your audience.

Adding humour into your speeches

Scott highlighted two key points about the use of humour:

1. You need to give yourself permission to have fun before your audience can have fun. 
2. It’s okay to make fun of yourself to make the audience laugh, but it is not cool to poke fun at others and embarrass them.

Using stories in your speeches

The easiest way to tell a story in your speech is to use your own life experience because it’s authentic and you don’t have to think too hard to build the content. While creating the story, you must make sure that it is something your audience is able to relate to. Once you are done creating the story, reduce the number of words you need to complete the story to half. Scott emphasised that, in storytelling, less is more.

A final quick tip from Scott

Most of the time speakers fail to deliver a good story to their audience because of the way they convey their punch lines. You need to pause before delivering the punch line to let your audience absorb your story and ready themselves for the punch line. Then, deliver your punch line. After delivering your punch line, pause again to let your audience absorb and comprehend your punch line. If the story is meant to be funny and nobody seems to be laughing, you will have to close off the story yourself, for example, you can bow your head down and say, “Please take a moment and bow your head in silence for the joke that just died here.” And then laugh it off before continuing your speech.

These reviews and summaries are provided in good faith and must not be used or copied without the permission of the speaker.