Jul 16

Hungry for Humorous Speeches? Try a Roast

I was idly playing videos on You Tube recently and I came across Dean Martin’s Roasts from the 1970s. I had a jolly old time watching some comedians from yesteryear engaging in humorous roasts. So I figured I should write a post about roasts and provide some roast speech examples. Although I talk about them in the Toastmasters context, the advice is absolutely applicable whether you’re giving a Toastmasters roast or not.

You can sometimes forget the skill of some of the old school comedians when they’re either a) not on TV so much anymore, b) Recognisable through films that aren’t really shown that much like The Cannonball Run or the original Ocean’s Eleven, c) they’re dead d) all of the above.

You can also see this basic concept at work at the White House Correspondence Dinner.
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Jul 14

Secret Comedy Writing Technique – Callbacks

Here’s another post in my on-going series Secret Comedy Writing Techniques. This one deals with Callbacks. What’s a callback you ask? Well, a callback is repeating a joke verbatim, or paraphrasing a joke, that got a laugh earlier in your speech or comedy routine. Continue reading

Jul 04

5 Rules Every Speech Writer Should Know

David Brooks, 1990 World Champion of Public Speaking, has written an article that appears on the World Champion’s Edge membership site. Here’s the third rule to give a little taster:

3. Write in a style that reflects your manner of speech.

This is not an authorization for you to write using careless speech patterns, slang, or a substandard conversational style. These are barely tolerable in speech and almost always unacceptable in writing. But writing in your natural speaking style-the style you use in a business conversation-will help you eliminate stuffy, stilted words and phrases that make you sound pretentious. Continue reading

Jul 03

Toastmasters: Evaluation Workshop

I attended an Evaluation Workshop given by the current UK & Ireland Evaluation Champion Hilary Briggs (Early Bird Speakers) and the 2004 winner and DTM, Bob Ferguson (Excaliburs). By the way, if you check out that link Hilary is on the left of the picture.

In the UK the Toastmasters Evaluation Contest happens at the same time as the International Speech Contest. I don’t believe that this is the case in other countries.

What these two Toastmasters giants don’t know about giving effective evaluations isn’t worth knowing quite frankly. Continue reading

Jul 02

The Joke is Dead, Long Live the Joke!

I came across an old article recently, which was published on The New York Times website. I thought it was very interesting and I wanted to re-publish the odd extract here along with my own comments. Continue reading