May 06
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. Continue reading
May 05
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:
May 04
“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. Continue reading
May 01
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
Apr 28
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”).
