HUMOR RECIPE

Ingredients:

90 seconds challenge, Twist in the tail, Word play, Property, Characters, Delivery

Identify your audience:

What kind of audience are you going to deliver your humorous speech to? Select your speech plot in such a way that your audience enjoy it. Most speakers fail here as they select a plot that brings humor only to them but not to the audience.

Let me give you an example on how I choose my plot for the humorous speech contest. Belonging to a corporate club, I was pretty sure that a speech plot related to IT field would help my audience relate to all the humor that I display on stage. I choose a plot to troll the work culture at IT office which worked out so well for me at Club, Area and even at Division.

After selecting the plot, start to identify stories or incidents that can be effective over the plot. Make sure that you restrict your stories or incidents to just 3 scenes.

Write a draft script including all the 3 scenes and keep it a side.

Now start adding the ingredients that I am going to suggest you to add more flavor to your recipe.

Please note that I can only suggest you the ingredients but when to use it and where to add it in your script should be a call that you should make. Because end of the day, it is your own recipe :P

Ingredient 1: 90 seconds Challenge

This is the well-known secret ingredient which most of the public speakers use in their speech. HAVE A CATCHY START, you can never read the mood of each and every individual sitting as audience. But something which you can possibly do is to bring them all to the same mood or mind set at once. This is your first target. If you are able to make your audience giggle in the first 90 seconds of your speech, I bet you that your audience are going to enjoy rest of your speech.

Best example: Division G humorous speech winner Hugh Connan Doyal delivered a speech about his own name. How difficult it is for people to pronounce his name was his objective. He was so clever in selecting a topic, which helped him shift the entire mood of the audience. His speech title was "HUGH CONNAN DOYAL HUGH CONNAN DOYAL HUGH CONNAN DOYAL"

As you all know, when a speaker is invited on the stage, contest master calls his name and then his title, then again his title repeated by his name. On the contest day we witness out contest master do this.

Our next speaker Hugh Connan Doyal HUGH CONNAN DOYAL HUGH CONNAN DOYAL HUGH CONNAN DOYAL

HUGH CONNAN DOYAL HUGH CONNAN DOYAL HUGH CONNAN DOYAL Hugh Connan Doyal

The entire audience were in laughter listening to the speech title.

Ingredient 2: Twist in the tail

As the name implies, you need to take the audience into a journey with the help of your story and give a twist at the end. Make sure that you get into the at most details of the story so that your audience can imagine and create their own visuals.

Best example: District 82 Humorous speech contest winner Shyamraj started his speech directly taking his audience into a journey.

When he was in his kinder garden, his madam asked him to spell out all the numbers.

Shyam started as 1….2….3….4….5…6….7….8…..9…10(slowly with a thinking poster).

Madam: Very good! Go on. .

Shyam: King Queen Jack . . .

This is a very simple incident were the audience were glued to Shyam’s story and an unexpected twist at the end with K,Q,J turned into a humour.

Ingredient 3: Word Play

Word Play is the rhyming phrases which speakers use in order to bring humour to your speech.

“I was not just walking over the stage but rocking over the stage” is one sample sentence which was used by Alexander Babu with its full effects.

Best example: T.Rajendran dialogs – do you think anybody else can be called the best :D

Ingredient 4: Property

There are so many speakers who come up with a prop to add effects to their humour.

Best example: Guruprasad, District 82 Humorous speech first runner up.

He came dressed like a NCC Sergeant and explained his story of becoming a NCC sergeant despite of being lean.
When the speaker himself comes dressed up as a character, audience see only the character of the story but not the speaker. This is an effective way to shorten the distance between the speaker and the audience.

Ingredient 5: Characters

When you script your speech, make sure that you get into the details of every character you define in your story. These are the characters who will remain in your audience heart when they try to recollect your speech.

For example: During my Division contest speech, I introduced a character called “Sombuthooki” (One who acts as spy in every team, sending constant updates to manager about the employees those who chit chat during work hours)

Even after my speech was over, there were so many people who walked up to me and appreciated for bringing up this character on stage. Because they were able to relate to this character in their own team.

All these 5 ingredients can help you in your speech but without the help of ingredient 6, your speech will never be received as the way you would like it to be received.

Ingredient 6 – DELIVERY:

Please make sure that you work on your gestures like Charlie Chaplin and Voice modulation like Vadivelu. They are the best in the business. Best jokes in your speech could fall flat without a proper body language. So please practice and work more on delivery.

Garnish your speech with a message at last. This is optional for a humorous speech but yet. It depends on the one who cooks!

Note – During the course of your preparation of this recipe, please observe the humor that happens around your life. I bet you can find at least 1 per day. Analyse on what made them laugh. You will get some patterns to experiment humor. Try to implement the same patterns in your speech. Try them with your friends first and check how well it works out. Get comfortable with your delivery and rock the stage !