Humor Presentation Tips – You Don’t Have to Be Funny to Be Funny
Capture the humor you see around you. Conor Cunneen shares a hilarious and insightful story about his book Why Ireland Never Invaded America and how humor evolves over time. From unexpected feedback about the book to audience interactions, Conor shows how paying attention to real-life moments can help you craft memorable and engaging presentations. Learn how to refine humor, make your stories better with each telling, and connect with your audience through laughter. Watch now and discover how to add humor to your speech, one step at a time.
Key Takeaways including Capture the Humor Around You
- Adding Humor to Your Speech is Natural: You don’t need to be naturally funny – humor comes from observing and capturing everyday moments that make people smile or laugh.
- Humor Enhances Connection: When you make your audience smile or laugh, brain chemicals like endorphins help create better engagement and connection with your message.
- Message First, Humor Second: Don’t try to write a humorous speech – write your speech first, then find ways to add appropriate humor that reinforces your key points.
- Capture the humor. Build a Humor Repository: Actively collect and record humorous moments, quips, and anecdotes from daily life that you can use later to enhance your presentations.
Want to Add Humor to your presentation? Get 53 Humorous Quotes & Flubs for any Speech
About IrishmanSpeaks
Conor Cunneen is an Irishman, happily exiled in Chicago where he says “the Guinness is good, the people are friendly and he has been force fed more corned beef and green beer than he ever had in Ireland!”
As an Irish immigrant, he is a very proud recipient of the President’s Gold Medal for Volunteer Service for the work he does with job seekers.
He is proud dad to John and Amy and a loving irritant to his long suffering wife, Pat, whom his sister-in-law states will be canonized the moment she leaves this planet!
He is also an in-demand keynote speaker, facilitator, author, consultant, award-winning humorist and master of ceremonies to associations, corporations and healthcare. Conor is a two-time cancer survivor who gives thanks every day to the wonderful healthcare professionals who helped him through his thyroid and prostate cancer journeys.
PHONE CONOR at 630 661 1220 to ensure a successful next event and an inspirational client-focused speaker you can rely on.
Conor Cunneen – IrishmanSpeaks.
Conor’s mission is to Improve People, Performance & Productivity – with a Smile. This Chicago-based motivational business speaker, cancer survivorship speaker, and business humorist promises to leave your audience with a Smile on the face, a Spring in the step, and memorable, actionable takeaways to ensure your meeting objectives are met.
More Tips for Adding Humor to your Presentation
Adding Humor to your Speech – Tip 24
Adding Humor Tip #25: Five Secrets to L.A.U.G.H.
Video Transcript: Humor Presentation Tips – You Don’t Have to Be Funny to Be Funny
So you say that you don’t have to be funny to be funny which kind of strikes me as funny but can you just elaborate that? The basic idea here is, I mean, we know and people do know that when you smile you feel better, when you laugh you feel better, and there’s basic reasons for that – the endorphins and the brain neurochemicals etc. just popping and making us feel better. And I do think that if you can, when you’re giving a message, if you can make a person feel better, you’re going to connect better with them and they’re going to be more engaged.
One of the ways to do it is by adding a little bit of humor to your presentation. Now I’m not talking about comedy – that’s a different thing. Humor is where you say something that puts a smile on the audience’s face or makes them chuckle that reinforces the message you’ve just previously given them. So you give them the message, you then give them a bit of humor which reinforces that message. They’re staying more engaged, they’re kind of “Oh, that’s I like that idea” etc.
Humor is the grease that kind of helps the speech to move and turn along. I believe when I say you don’t have to be funny to be funny, first reaction I get from a lot of people is “But I’m not funny! I can’t add humor to my presentation!” And I say you don’t have to be funny to be funny. The basic idea is that over the last week you said something to a number of people or different people that put a smile on their face, you heard something from different people that put a smile on your face.
What I’m saying to my audiences when I’m speaking to them on this program is capture the humor that you see around you. You don’t know when you’re going to use it, if you’re going to use it – you may not use it at all. But if you can capture the humor around you on a regular basis, you’ll have a repository of little quips, anecdotes, stories, humorous lines, quotes that sometime, somewhere when you’re looking for an additional piece of content to reinforce the message that you have given, that then will help you to be able to provide the content.