Engage Your Audience with Humor – Presentation Strategies

How Humor Can be a Powerful Tool in Business and Presentations 

I love doing podcasts especially when you have great interviewers like Marcia Riner. In this video, I discuss how humor can be a powerful tool in business, presentations, and communication. Many people believe you need to be naturally funny to use humor effectively, but that’s not true. You don’t have to be funny to be funny—you just need to recognize and capture everyday humorous moments that naturally occur around you. Make sure you capture and record those moments.

Reinforce your serious point with Humor

I emphasize the importance of making a serious point first and then reinforcing it with humor. This approach helps people connect with your message, making it more memorable and engaging. I encourage professionals, whether in business negotiations or public speaking, to pay attention to moments that make them smile or laugh. By recording these moments—whether in a notebook or on a phone—you create a personal archive of relatable anecdotes that can be used to enhance communication.

Use relatable Humor in your Presentations

I illustrate this with a personal story about getting stuck in the back seat of a car due to child locks while picking up my granddaughter. This amusing experience reinforced an important lesson about paying attention to details—an idea that easily translates to workplace safety, manufacturing, finance, and other industries.

Workshops and interactive discussions further enhance this approach. When you engage your audience by asking them what lesson they take from a story, they become part of the learning process and remember the message more effectively.

Business Humor isn’t about telling jokes

Humor isn’t about telling jokes—it’s about using real-life experiences to reinforce key points. Whether you’re presenting, negotiating, or leading a team, humor helps you connect with your audience and make your message stick. By paying attention to what makes you laugh, you can harness humor to be a more engaging and effective communicator.

Video Text: Mastering Humor in Business & Presentations to connect with your audience

If I want to connect better with my audiences, what I try to do is make a serious point and then reinforce it sometimes with humor. I say the same for people in business—if you’re in negotiations, make your serious point, and after that, you have an opportunity to reinforce it with a little bit of appropriate humor. That reinforces your point, gives you a much better chance of connecting with them, and helps them appreciate your point of view and message.

Interviewer: Well, do you think that anybody can do it, or is it some kind of natural gift? Like, for example, were you born with this? Were you always funny when you were little, or did you develop it as a skill?

Conor: Well, my teacher used to say to me, “Cunneen, you’re a total clown,” whether that was… But I think that’s slightly different. I would say I probably always had a slight gift of humor, but I never appreciated it. But here’s my core point, Natasha: you don’t have to be funny to be funny.

People kind of go, “What is he talking about?” But my basic view is that almost certainly, in the last week, every one of your listeners would have said something or done something that put a smile on someone’s face. They’ve heard something that put a smile on their face.

What I encourage people to do as part of my programs on adding humor to your presentation is to capture those moments. Record them, put them into your iPhone, notebook, or whatever it is, because sometime, somewhere, you may have the opportunity to use one or two of those anecdotes or quips to reinforce your key points in a conversation, negotiation, or presentation.

You don’t have to be funny to be funny. But what you do need to do, I believe, is decide, I want to add humor to my presentation because it will help me better connect and reinforce my message.

Interviewer: So we will hear something, and then we will record that, write it down… but what do you mean by that? Do you mean phrases, or do we come up with jokes? Could you give an example of something you would record?

Conor: I’ll ask you a question. Over the last week—humor researchers will tell you that the average adult laughs about 15 times a day. And you’re probably thinking, I don’t do that. But you probably do; you’re just not paying attention to it.

If we take 15 times a day and multiply that by seven, that’s about 100 times a week that you might have laughed, chuckled, or smiled. What I encourage people to do is pay attention to those moments. When you do that, it will help you build the content you need to add humor to a presentation.

I’ll give you a specific example. I speak a lot to manufacturing companies, safety organizations, and places that require attention to detail. So, when I go to a safety conference or a manufacturing organization where safety is critical—though it is in all workplaces—I’ll say:

“All right, you want to come in with ten fingers and toes and leave with ten fingers and toes.”

That’s a nice, simple definition of safety in the workplace. But you’ve got to pay attention to your surroundings. Let me illustrate this.

A couple of weeks ago, I was collecting my darling granddaughter, Maggie, from soccer practice with my wife. We were taking Maggie overnight. We put Maggie into the back seat of the car. My wife strapped her in and sat beside her. I then decided I would sit in the back seat of the car as well.

After a couple of seconds, Maggie looks over and says, “Grampy!, you should be driving the car.”

And I said, “Maggie, I want to!” And as only a little cute six-year-old granddaughter could say, she just looked at me. So I said, “Okay, I’ll drive the car.”

I get out of the car—except we’ve got a problem. We’re on child lock. Which also means we’re on Grampy lock. I can’t get out of the car!

I had to phone my daughter, who was five minutes away, to come back and open the car door for us. And I realized—this is a humorous moment! We were laughing about it anyway, but when my daughter walked over, she was breaking her sides laughing. I thought, Hey, this is a little humorous anecdote I might be able to use sometime.

I have since used it when speaking to manufacturing organizations, saying:

“You have to pay attention to detail. What details are critical in your organization?”

Then I might ask the audience:

“How many people here have kids who are still strapped into the back seat of the car?”

About 10-15% of hands go up.

I say, “All right, the next time you’re strapping your little darling into the back seat, think about the workplace. Think about the equivalent of child locks in your organization—things that may or may not cause problems if you don’t pay attention to them.”

And for the rest of you—maybe you don’t have kids—but tomorrow, when you come to a traffic light, you’ll likely see some mom or dad in their Honda Odyssey with a kid strapped in the back seat. And you’ll think, Oh, I need to remember this concept about child locks.

That’s a simple example of a humorous anecdote that absolutely happened. Then I asked myself, How can I use it?

Basically, when I’m doing my programs on adding humor to presentations or the workplace, I’ll ask the audience:

“What’s the core lesson from that anecdote?”

And they’ll say, “You’ve got to pay attention.”

Then I’ll ask:

“Where or how could you use that type of anecdote in your situation?”

If you’re in manufacturing, you’ve got to pay attention to safety. If you’re an auditor or financial professional, you’ve got to pay attention to detail. If you’re a lawyer, well, everyone in a sense has to pay attention to detail.

It’s a simple little anecdote that happened, and I can use it in almost any circumstance to reinforce the importance of paying attention to detail and surroundings.

Interviewer: I think it’s really smart and convenient when you can ask your audience, “What is your lesson from this? What is the message?” Then they basically give you the answer, and that means they will own it even better.

Conor: Yeah, well, that’s the great thing about workshops in particular, Natasha. I do keynotes on a number of topics. My core one is The Gift of GAB: Goals, Attitude, Behavior. But I also do workshops around that topic because they improve people’s performance and productivity—which is my mission.

The difference between a workshop and a keynote is that in a workshop, you throw your point out to the audience, ask them questions, and get them to discuss it. In one sense, a six-hour workshop doesn’t require significantly more content than a keynote. What it does require is for the audience to be more interactive, to think more, and to do exercises around the content.

So, the advantage of having good content in a keynote is that you can then spread it into a workshop or…