Why Bad Presentations Happen to Good Causes - The Goodman ...

Humor: The Funny Thing About Being Funny
People love to laugh, so humor can be a powerful tool for presenters. It can start
presentations off on the right foot, provide needed pick-me-ups as you roll along, and
send your audience off with a smile. It’s also a great way to keep their attention, because
once a presenter has established that she’s got a good sense of humor (and isn’t afraid to
use it), everyone will listen more closely for the next good line.
If being funny is part of who you are, then it is perfectly natural for humor to be part of
your presentation. Having written for network television sitcoms (“Dinosaurs” on ABC
and “The Nanny” on CBS), I am very comfortable with comedy and look for appropriate
ways to incorporate it into my speeches and workshops. My speech, “Storytelling as Best
Practice,” offers a useful example of how I try to use humor not only to entertain, but to
illustrate a substantive point as well.
At the beginning of the speech, I note that nonprofits have excellent stories to tell, but they
tend to tell them badly, often weighing them down with excessively technical language,
acronyms, and statistics galore. To demonstrate, I invite the audience to play a game:
I announce that I am going to tell a story that everyone in the room knows, only I am
going to tell it like someone from a nonprofit would. The challenge for the audience:
Decode the jargon and identify the story.
With appropriately bland PowerPoint slides to back me up, I then provide a highly
condensed plot summary of the heartwarming American classic, “The Wizard of Oz,”
except in my version the heart has been surgically removed and the story has been
re-titled, “The Role of Family and Community in Mentoring Alienated Youth in the
American Midwest.”
One day, an at-risk youth from a blended family in the economically depressed farm belt is rendered
unconscious during an extreme weather event.
When she awakens, she undertakes a long, hazardous journey to a distant, mineral-based
metropolitan center. Along the way, she is accompanied by three variously challenged and
apparently homeless adults while also being pursued by a malevolent person of color – in this
case, green.
Just before she reaches her destination, she briefly struggles with opium addiction, but fortunately
that problem is cured by snow.
By this point, everyone in the audience has recognized the story, so the narration abruptly
ends there, often drowned out by laughter. More importantly, though, a serious point
has been made in a way that lets audience members recognize their foibles and laugh at
themselves – which is probably preferable to the opening I used in previous versions of the
speech: “Hey folks: Your storytelling sucks.”
pg. 45
“Laughter is not only
evidence of audience
enjoyment or approval, but
is also a powerful spur to
continued attentiveness.”
– Max Atkinson
Author
Lend Me Your Ears