May 25

32 Essential Skills Every Humorous Speaker Should Have

I’ve been inspired by fellow blogger Andrew Dlugan’s post 25 Essential Presentation Skills for Public Speaking.  audience-laughter
I think in order to help you learn to be funny, these are some of the skills and humour techniques that you should have. Some directly relate to giving a speech, whilst others involve external factors. You’ll see what I mean below.

I know that there are some people wonder: “should you be funny in a speech?” I think it really depends on the circumstances and topic of your speech. For the most part I would say yes. Humour is a great way to connect with your audiences and have them remember your message. One of the essential skills below addresses this very idea.

Can you think of any more? If so, leave a comment below.

1. Create Large Amounts of Humour – duh, seems obvious, right? We should be able to create a large amount of humorous material that we can draw upon. Material created by your own sense of humour, not lifeless techniques on paper. Continue reading

May 16

President Obama’s 2,000 Year Old Speaking Secret

If you have to make presentations as part of your job you might be able to pick up some useful tips from this post. This post is a kind of follow up to my post Lessons from President Obama’s Inaugural Speech.

This is also a great post for those who are working their way through either the Toastmasters Competent Communicator manual (project number 9 “persuade with power”) or the Persuasive Speaking Advanced manual.

You see much has been written about Obama’s speaking skill. He has routinely been compared to great speakers such as John F Kennedy, Winston Churchill, Martin Luther King Jr. and Abraham Lincoln. He uses rhetoric and oratorical skills that wouldn’t be out of place in Ancient Greece or Rome. Continue reading

May 03

Musical Impressionist Danny Gans Passes Away

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I was surprised to hear of the passing of musical impressionist Danny Gans who was 52. While you may not have heard of Danny Gans his story is certainly fascinating. A former minor league Baseball player Gans tried his hand at stand-up comedy performing in comedy clubs at the beginning of his career, but he didn’t like doing them.

He discovered that he could sing as well and spent the next 15 years travelling around America making his money on the corporate circuit, performing 125 nights a year. He said he polished his act in front of “middle America, people who read People magazine… They loved clean comics. They loved music. It was Elvis’ audience”. However, it was only after he realised that his kids missed him that he decided to try a different tact. Continue reading

May 02

BBC 2’s The Speaker – The Final

It only seems like yesterday when I was writing a post about BBC 2’s new realitywinner-of-the-speaker-bbc-2009
TV talent show The Speaker. In fact it was about 4 weeks ago. They ended up
broadcasting two episodes a week, rather than one per week for 8 weeks. It was actually an interesting show in the end and the final and some strong young speakers in it.

As some of the reviews of The Speaker have said, and I am inclined to agree, it felt a little bit icky when they got taken to Malawi to meet children who were poverty-stricken so that the young speakers could have a topic for their final speech. Good little life experience for the speakers maybe, but a bit heavy-handed I felt. Continue reading

Apr 29

Twitter and Presentations: The Ultimate Interruption?

Unless you’ve been living under a rock you would’ve heard about Twitter.  Now, it seems, even live presenters aren’t immune from it’s charms. 

Speaker Olivia Mitchell blogged about using Twitter in a presentation. She provides some very useful tips on harnessing the power of this new social communication tool… Continue reading