The American author and humorist E.B. White (who wrote Charlotte’s Webb and Stuart Little) once said: “Analyzing humour is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it”.
In my on-going mini series Secret Comedy Writing Techniques, I try not to analyse why something’s funny. I don’t want to talk about a cathartic release or whatever. What I’m attempting to do is…
I came across an interview with David Brooks the 1990 World Champion of Speaking by fellow speaker and blogger Steve Pavlina. Steve, who runs a personal development blog, saw David Brooks give a presentation in Las Vegas. You should check out the interview right here.
Okay, a bit more info, Steve asked David the following questions:
“How Do You Know if Your Comedy is Quantifiable?”, “How do you know you’re being funny?” and “How do you measure comedy?” These were just some of the questions I was asked recently.
I responded: “yes, comedy is measureable. If somebody laughs, it’s comedy. If no-one laughs it isn’t. But if you get no laughs, that doesn’t automatically make it tragic. It’s just comedy that doesn’t work”.
Comedy is also subjective and a matter of taste. If you watch the films of Charlie Chaplin and you don’t laugh, does that mean to say that he wasn’t funny? Or that it wasn’t comedy? Of course not. He was extremely funny otherwise he wouldn’t've had the success that he had. Then does success in comedy equal funny? Just because I’m not famous does that make me any less funny? But I think that this potentially opens a whole can of worms.
“So by that rationale if you laugh at a tragic news story, does that make it comic?”
I went along to the Divison B all London final of the International Speech contest recently. You can read about that in a bit more detail at over The London Speaker. It was really valuable to go along and see what the finalists are like, especially if you’ve not seen them before.
What I found useful going along, and which I can recommend, is
In my on-going mini series Secret Comedy Writing Techniques I’m going to briefly cover Spoonerisms. A spoonerism is a play on words in which corresponding consonants, vowels, or morphemes are switched. It is named after the Reverend William Archibald Spooner (1844–1930), Warden of New College, Oxford, who was notoriously prone to oming out with these verbal twists. An example from the Reverend is as follows: “It is kisstomary to cuss the bride” (”customary to kiss”).
This past Sunday I had the good fortune to be a mystery speaker for the final time this contest season at the Division G contest held in Milton Keynes. It was my first time at a Division contest and I was impressed with the way it was run and the standard of the contestants. That’s the thing about Toastmasters,
The next entry in my mini series Secret Comedy Writing Techniques is the technique Colemanballs. This is a term coined by the British satirical magazine Private Eye. It describes verbal gaffes made by (usually British) sports commentators.
The term is derived from the surname of a retired BBC broadcaster called David Coleman. The balls part of the term relates to the expression “balls up”, which is a British slang term for a mistake. A few examples of Colemanballs are as follows:
Here’s a follow up to my recent post How to Win a Speech Contest - Even if you lose! I’ve done it again, but, alas, not in the same way. Last night I came in 2nd at the Area Contest for the International Speech Contest, but I still walked out a winner. Maybe you’re thinking: “okay, I can understand you sayng that last time because you, ultimately, won the contest. But not this time, surely?”
Well, I’m afraid that it is true. How did I win this time then?
This month marks the 40th Anniversary of the death of Martin Luther King Jr. (April 4th 1968).
So as a bit of a departure from my usual content on this blog, I figured what better way than to celebrate the amazing speaking skills of the man. Watch and listen to the sheer energy and passion of King.
His use of repetition (he says “I have a dream” 7 times and repeats other phrases) to convey his message and his reference to President Abraham Lincoln’s phrase “four score and seven years ago”, when King says “five score years ago, a great American…” as he stood in the shadow of Lincoln’s Monument. An amazing speech and an amazing man.
In my on-going mini series Secret Comedy Writing Techniques I’m going to deal with Goldwynisms. To give you a quick context Film Studio owner Samuel Goldwyn of M.G.M was famous for his own version of malapropisms and various speech errors which ended up being called: “Goldwynisms”. The Wikipedia definition is as follows:
“a humorous statement or phrase resulting from the use of incongruous or contradictory words, situations, idioms, etc.” Some examples from Mr. Goldwyn are:
