At the CHIC Toastmasters meetiing, Jan 20, I delivered the speech, “Youthful Mistake” for the Entertaining Speaker Advanced Manual, project #1 (The Entertaining Speech).

For this speech, I wanted to attempt two distinct types of entertainment value:  action oriented humor, and quiet subtle humor.  And not surprisingly, I received mixed reaction accordingly.   I also consciously worked on the pace of my speech: slowing it down to emphasize enunciations, pauses, and vocal variety.  This has always been my weakness, and required special attention to be on par with a professional speaker.  For this article, I will throw out some examples of what I thought worked well to enhance the humor, why it made the audience laugh, and vice versa.  There are 3 lessons I learned: The value of 'Action' humor, the setup of 'understatement humor', and the delivery of subtle humor.

Action-oriented humor: I started out the speech describing my youthful lifestyle as ‘Dangerous’, while imitating the ‘Dangerous’ move patented by Laura (check the website photo, if you can’t access the video of my speech).  The imitation was humorous to those who have seen Laura’s speech in person (so there was an ‘inside joke’ phenomenon), for the same reason that anyone who imitate Little Shenyang can always create a laugh.  Or, someone who can imitate accents (Indian accents seems to be very popular with the Chinese audience).  Furthermore, the more different (in personality, or looks, or other major characteristics) the imitator is compared to the one being imitated, yet still providing a canny imitation, then the more humorous it would be; for example, a guy imitating a girl, or youth imitating an elder, or anyone imitating Caesar (inside joke for District85 Area21 TM clubs).  That was my lesson number one.  However, my follow up ‘action humor’ was the line: “No, I never did anything illegal; I wasn’t even a bad boy bad boy.”  I sang ‘Bad boy bad boy’, lyrics from the popular Chinese hip hop song, but was not appreciated.   I was hoping to generate humor out of being ‘clownish’;  But unlike the ‘Dangerous’ punchline, it lacked the element of imitation, or inside joke.  It was not surprising that the joke bombed.  Similarly, in the line “Well, I just had a brilliant idea!  I will imitate Jackie Chan and climb over the gate! “, when I mentioned “Jackie Chan”, I made a Kungfu pose.  I heard some laughs, but they were mostly dry.   Again, I was counting solely on the body movement to create the humor:  That was not enough—for a normal speech delivery.

The more subtle humors I tried out have worked better. “I finally nudged myself to the top of the gate.  Then I realized, my stupidity was just getting started.  First I realized that getting up here was much easier than getting back down.”   The underlined punch lines were in the category of ‘understatement’, which in this worked much better than I thought.  Understatement, by definition, states a fact in a way that is in a lesser degree than the obvious.  Therefore, the punch line has to put in the context of the reality in the speech, in order for the audience to fully take in how much was understated.  So, the second lesson of the article is:  When using understatement for humor, the setup is important to build the reality, from which the punch line can understate.   It appears that the delivery should be much more subtle, or ‘understated’, to enhance the humor.  During my delivery of the second punch line was still a bit overdone.  I believed the humor could have come out much better with even more subtlety.

Speaking of subtlety in humor delivery, I am now fully convinced that PACE is critical.  Sure, the ‘pregnant pause’ required right before the punch line, but in many cases, the setup, the entire joke itself, are victims of speedy delivery.  The audience doesn’t get drawn into the story line, to the setup, to your own emotion.  Lesson 3:  Slow down.  If a normal speech delivery is at 100 words a minute, then when drawing in the audience in the setup for the joke, perhaps slow it down to 80 words a minute.  Think of it as extreme story telling.

So, the three lessons: 1. Don’t count on pure action humor.  2. Set up understatement jokes with more details to describe the baseline reality from which the punch line will understate.  3.  Subtlety of humor requires a deliberate pace in order to draw in the audience fully, before releasing the punch line in its full splendor.