Episode 42

What’s So Funny? Humor and Public Speaking

In this week's episode of Ongoing Mastery: Presenting & Speaking, Kirsten and Kellie talk about humor and public speaking, what works and what doesn’t. They also share their favorite jokes.

Our favorite moments::

  • <00:55> Self-deprecating humor can undermine your authority
  • <01:18> What happened when an experienced speaker’s joke landed very poorly
  • <02:58> Kellie’s go-to for humor
  • <04:39> Local and cultural humor doesn’t land beyond the local community/culture
  • <06:36> Kirsten relies on dad jokes
  • <12:28> Kellie’s take-away tip
  • <13:41> You have to know your audience
  • <14:17> Stay culturally relevant
  • <15:43> Kirsten’s Norse curse
  • <17:50> Comic Sans on J. Schuh’s book cover
  • <19:32> Kirsten’s take-away tip

If you enjoyed this conversation about humor and public speaking, check out Season 3, Episode 25: Why Embrace the Beginner Mindset?: Interview with J. Schuh. Link is in the show notes

Rourke Training’s webpage: https://www.rourketraining.com/

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Read a transcript of this episode:  https://share.descript.com/view/b4m87gdGTLs

For the video version of this episode: https://youtu.be/mkPS69E-Kng

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Transcript
Kirsten:

Hi.

Kirsten:

This week Kellie and I talk humor and public speaking.

Kirsten:

What works and what doesn't.

Kirsten:

We also share our favorite jokes.

Kirsten:

Let's jump into it.

Kirsten:

Hello everyone.

Kirsten:

Welcome to Ongoing Mastery: Presenting & Speaking the podcast.

Kirsten:

Hi Kellie, how are you?

Kellie:

Hey, Kirsten.

Kellie:

I'm good.

Kellie:

How are you?

Kirsten:

I am good.

Kirsten:

So let's talk about humor today.

Kirsten:

Yes.

Kirsten:

Uh, what you have thoughts about humor, what are your, some of your thoughts

Kirsten:

about humor and public speaking.

Kirsten:

I

Kellie:

do have thoughts about humor and public speaking.

Kellie:

It's a great way to bond with your audience to get your audience a

Kellie:

little bit loose, especially if your topic is mandatory in some

Kellie:

way or maybe traditionally dull.

Kellie:

That humor can be tricky.

Kellie:

It can be really hard to pull off.

Kellie:

So it's both, it's a double-edged sword,

Kirsten:

shall we say.

Kirsten:

Yeah.

Kirsten:

And self-deprecating humor, while is often good in in person settings,

Kirsten:

if you're somebody who is trying to establish your authority.

Kirsten:

Mm-hmm.

Kirsten:

If you already have authority, self-deprecating humor is fine.

Kirsten:

But if you're somebody trying to establish your authority, depends.

Kirsten:

You gotta know your audience.

Kirsten:

And yeah, it's amazing.

Kirsten:

Even really experienced speakers at, I think it was last year's

Kirsten:

NSA conference Influence.

Kirsten:

There was a very established author and speaker who made a joke that landed so

Kirsten:

wrong with me and a bunch of other people that one of the people I knew walked out.

Kirsten:

Wow.

Kirsten:

Like I was sitting there going.

Kirsten:

Okay.

Kirsten:

Because it was a joke that probably landed differently 15, 20, 30 years ago.

Kirsten:

Yeah.

Kirsten:

But he made a joke about retardation.

Kirsten:

Oh, oh yeah.

Kirsten:

Oh no.

Kirsten:

Yeah, and I, and for those who don't know, . I grew up with a

Kirsten:

mom who's a clinical psychologist who worked with retarded clients.

Kirsten:

And I spent a lot of time, you know, with, in that environment and in fact

Kirsten:

one of my friends when I was a kid was somebody whose body was much,

Kirsten:

much older but had the same age as me, and we had the same sense of humor.

Kirsten:

So I got no sense of humor about that at all.

Kirsten:

No.

Kirsten:

Um, and it was interesting because we were all very disappointed.

Kirsten:

That this really brilliant man made this, you know, offhand

Kirsten:

retard joke and it was like, Ooh.

Kirsten:

And I get that humor has shifted and some things are, you know, some people find it

Kirsten:

a lot harder to do humor now, but yeah.

Kirsten:

You know, there's still ways to do humor.

Kirsten:

Absolutely.

Kirsten:

What are some, some of your go-tos for being able to include humor?

Kirsten:

Well,

Kellie:

as you know, I teach college writing and often first year college

Kellie:

writing, first semester, first class, 8:00 AM Monday, first day this semester.

Kellie:

Brand new, brand new college students, and many of them have

Kellie:

been taught in their high schools.

Kellie:

I.

Kellie:

To address their faculty by Mr.

Kellie:

Or Mrs.

Kellie:

And so I get a lot of Mrs.

Kellie:

Donovan, and I am not Mrs.

Kellie:

Donovan.

Kellie:

It's not my legal name, it's not how I'm known in the world at all.

Kellie:

And so I make a joke about it because I want them to laugh a little bit and I want

Kellie:

it to stick in all of the first day stuff.

Kellie:

And so I make a point of saying, you can call me Professor Donovan.

Kellie:

Prof, Donovan Prof.

Kellie:

D, you can call me Wisest Moon Goddess if you need to, but don't call me Mrs.

Kellie:

Donovan.

Kellie:

That's my mother.

Kellie:

None of us want her teaching this class.

Kellie:

And then I move on.

Kellie:

Right?

Kellie:

Because for most 18 year olds, the thought of their parent

Kellie:

teaching the class is funny.

Kellie:

Yes.

Kellie:

Doesn't matter who their parents are, even if their parents are teachers, right?

Kellie:

And so it's a safe joke that points to something that's important to me.

Kellie:

Yeah.

Kellie:

and it's not, it's not critical to the course.

Kellie:

It often takes some students multiple tries to get the

Kellie:

professor part right, but.

Kellie:

At least I've made the joke up front and it gives me a way to refer back

Kellie:

to it that's not finger wagging

Kirsten:

at them.

Kirsten:

Yeah, and I noticed that my use of humor has shifted over the years because when

Kirsten:

I first moved up to Massachusetts in 2000 and was doing the technical training,

Kirsten:

public speaking thing, I was all over Boston then all over North America,

Kirsten:

and then a bunch of gigs overseas.

Kirsten:

And so when I was local, there's a lot of local humor that works.

Kirsten:

There's a lot of local humor you need to be careful of, but there's

Kirsten:

a lot of local humor that works.

Kirsten:

And I'd gotten in the habit of using like, you know, Massachusetts,

Kirsten:

oh, I packed my car kind of humor.

Kirsten:

Yeah.

Kirsten:

That does not land outside of, uh, regions that understand it.

Kirsten:

And I also use cultural humor and jokes and geekiness, which is my normal thing.

Kirsten:

And then I went overseas.

Kirsten:

and none of my jokes made any sense to anybody that I was working with.

Kirsten:

Yeah, yeah.

Kirsten:

And so I had to completely stop and I hadn't built in a backup.

Kirsten:

So one of the things to be aware of is like as Kellie and I, you know,

Kirsten:

work with clients on gestures and that gestures have a lot of meanings, and

Kirsten:

there's a lot of stuff that you do that if you are dealing with an international

Kirsten:

audience, you need to be aware of what gestures mean in other cultures.

Kirsten:

Same thing with humor.

Kirsten:

. Mm-hmm.

Kirsten:

, you know, there's a bunch of words that my friends in the UK happily use that

Kirsten:

they cannot use in the United States because people, I know some of those.

Kirsten:

Yes, yes.

Kirsten:

One of them starts with a C and it is a perfectly, you

Kirsten:

know, Hey buddy word, not here.

Kirsten:

It's not.

Kirsten:

. So yeah, you gotta be careful.

Kirsten:

One of them starts

Kellie:

with an F.

Kellie:

It is another word for cigarette.

Kirsten:

Yes.

Kirsten:

And yes.

Kirsten:

Yes, exactly.

Kirsten:

And it's like, uh, yeah, we're not going there, you know?

Kirsten:

Exactly.

Kirsten:

So you have to be careful.

Kirsten:

I've defaulted to dad jokes, like that's become my go to now, . So

Kirsten:

I now look for really, really bad, like, you know, Hey Kellie, knock,

Kirsten:

knock, who's there interrupting sloth.

Kirsten:

And okay, see, Kellie didn't say interrupting sloth who?

Kirsten:

And then the response is, which does not read on radio, but only reads on video.

Kirsten:

But she left because she knows the joke.

Kirsten:

So there's also knock, knock who's there.

Kirsten:

Interrupting cow, interrupting Moo.

Kirsten:

Yes.

Kirsten:

That kind of thing, like really dumb.

Kirsten:

Do you have a go-to dumb joke or no?

Kellie:

I don't know that I have a go-to, but in the strain of absurdist

Kellie:

humor that apparently all toddlers and four or five or so year old kids go

Kellie:

through, it's just a phase of their understanding of how language works

Kellie:

and how to get a reaction from people.

Kellie:

Absurdist humor.

Kellie:

So knock, knock,

Kirsten:

who's there?

Kellie:

Potato.

Kellie:

And then fall over laughing.

Kellie:

Right.

Kellie:

That's exactly that expression that you just made.

Kellie:

Yes.

Kellie:

Is the joke.

Kellie:

Right.

Kellie:

Okay.

Kellie:

Completely non-sequitur.

Kellie:

Yep.

Kellie:

Potato and that

Kirsten:

sort of, Yes.

Kirsten:

Yeah.

Kirsten:

. Yeah.

Kirsten:

This, this is one of those where you're gonna want to go to YouTube and watch

Kirsten:

the video of this if you're listening on the, uh, the stripes on Apple or

Kirsten:

anything else, because yeah, facial expressions are all, and then you can

Kirsten:

get away with voices in some cases, like I really love a cheesy pirate joke.

Kirsten:

I.

Kirsten:

So I will always do, you know, what is the favorite letter

Kirsten:

of the alphabet for a pirate?

Kirsten:

And most people will, you know, call out r r, and then you wait and

Kirsten:

somebody will get the one you mean.

Kirsten:

But it's okay because most people say R.

Kirsten:

Then you go, oh, you think it'd be R, but it's the sea.

Kirsten:

And you gotta lean into the sound effect of the voice in

Kirsten:

order for that joke to work.

Kirsten:

But.

Kirsten:

. If you have a lack of dignity like I do, then you know, rock on.

Kirsten:

It works.

Kirsten:

I find like one of the other ways of using humor that I used recently is I.

Kirsten:

Because I've been doing this a really long time, like you have, I don't

Kirsten:

really worry about people thinking I'm being silly because mm-hmm.

Kirsten:

, I've always been silly as a way of making especially nervous folks

Kirsten:

relax because technical training.

Kirsten:

Yeah.

Kirsten:

You know, so I now in, like in the last conference, I always

Kirsten:

put on music when I start.

Kirsten:

And the last conference, yep.

Kirsten:

My session was eight 30 in the morning on the last day of the conference.

Kirsten:

Oh, welcome to hell.

Kirsten:

Like, yeah, it's the worst spot, but it's okay because at 8 0 5, like I waited until

Kirsten:

the eight o'clock, you know, the sessions were CLO 8 0 5, my pentatonics went on,

Kirsten:

it cranked up and I'm out there doing my thing and Hansen and people are walking by

Kirsten:

and I'm in the hallway going, come on in.

Kirsten:

You really wanna be in this session?

Kirsten:

This is the session you don't need tough for.

Kirsten:

And he can oter chump of myself.

Kirsten:

But I don't, I don't mind.

Kirsten:

I don't care.

Kirsten:

And also it really gave people a, huh?

Kirsten:

Like this is what you're gonna be getting with me.

Kirsten:

This is an energy thing.

Kirsten:

It allowed people to lighten up because learning and development

Kirsten:

conferences, that's a lot of all conferences, it's a lot of material.

Kirsten:

Yeah.

Kirsten:

You're drinking from a fire hose, so you wanna have some fun with it.

Kirsten:

Yeah.

Kirsten:

And I personally love, you know, putting on, you know, music in

Kirsten:

the morning, so, One thing that

Kellie:

President Biden did recently in the White House

Kellie:

Correspondents' Dinner was.

Kellie:

Perfect.

Kellie:

I mean, the White House Correspondents' Dinner is already a roast.

Kellie:

It's supposed to, as they say, punch up at the people in power and skew satirize.

Kellie:

And of course when Biden announced that he was running again, his age is a problem.

Kellie:

Even among those who might support him and among other jokes.

Kellie:

Biden made a perfect joke and just sort of tossed aside that he was personal

Kellie:

friends with President James Madison.

Kellie:

One of the founding fathers, the joke slays because of course

Kellie:

he's making fun of his age.

Kellie:

That issue is not gonna go away on the campaign trail, and he's got to

Kellie:

be able to deal with it in some way.

Kellie:

And so by making a joke that's funny and a joke that exaggerates the

Kellie:

problem that goes with concerns.

Kellie:

Are focused on, yeah, he's diffusing the issue.

Kellie:

Yeah.

Kellie:

And also, you know, crack timing as part of the concern about age is a

Kellie:

proxy for his intellectual capacity.

Kellie:

Is it diminishing as it can with age?

Kellie:

And if you can deliver well-crafted material with good timing,

Kellie:

it is a sign that you are

Kirsten:

fine.

Kirsten:

Yeah, and it, and it's hard to deliver.

Kirsten:

You definitely wanna practice.

Kirsten:

How do you feel Kellie, about people work shopping their humor at big like speeches?

Kirsten:

How do you feel about that?

Kirsten:

No.

Kirsten:

, Kellie: I feel like no . So my big

Kirsten:

lane, which what I mean by that is know what kind of humor sits well with, you

Kirsten:

know, Your audience to know what kind of humor is or isn't appropriate there.

Kirsten:

And then if you are not someone who is routinely making the kinds of

Kirsten:

observations that make other people laugh, if that's not generally your

Kirsten:

personality, a big speech is not the time to debut your standup routine.

Kirsten:

, right?

Kirsten:

That's something you need to work into.

Kirsten:

Either practice speeches for the big one, or lower stakes speaking

Kirsten:

opportunities, just to get a sense for how well it plays in the room.

Kirsten:

But you've gotta be aware of your audience and all of that.

Kirsten:

I, for example, would never really launch into, say, fairly raunchy humor.

Kirsten:

Hmm.

Kirsten:

I find it funny, but I don't think I can deliver it in a way that makes it funny.

Kirsten:

. And so that's not something I'm ever gonna do in a public speaking situation,

Kirsten:

even if it's appropriate to the moment.

Kirsten:

Right.

Kirsten:

It's not humor I can pull

Kirsten:

off.

Kirsten:

Yeah.

Kirsten:

And it's, it's really important that you know your audience and you don't

Kirsten:

always get to know your audience.

Kirsten:

So Yeah, you gotta be careful.

Kirsten:

Like I'm of an age where a lot of my cultural references.

Kirsten:

are of a point where people in my audience that are, you know, half my age mm-hmm.

Kirsten:

don't, a lot of 'em have no idea what the heck I'm talking about.

Kirsten:

Yeah.

Kirsten:

So one of the things that you need to do as part of ongoing mastery is

Kirsten:

if you're gonna be working humor.

Kirsten:

That is one of the reasons why you need to stay culturally relevant.

Kirsten:

Yes, and you need to be aware, like, please understand, I am not asking

Kirsten:

you to do the thing that NPR does.

Kirsten:

And I love them.

Kirsten:

I love them to death.

Kirsten:

But every once in a while, folks on the local NPR station will try to speak in

Kirsten:

modern, edgy, patois, whatever the cool kids say, and they will try to do a joke.

Kirsten:

In whatever the slang is of the twenties or the teens, and it hurts my soul.

Kirsten:

Yeah, because it doesn't land and it's also not delivered.

Kirsten:

As like with the professional, you know, it's clearly somebody who really wants

Kirsten:

to, please don't, just don't like, be aware of the things, but figure out what

Kirsten:

your audiences are and shape your humor accordingly to things that are kind

Kirsten:

of absurdities of life or things Yeah.

Kirsten:

That you know, you're gonna have, you're gonna have the one, one person

Kirsten:

out of 99 who is gonna get bent.

Kirsten:

and that person is gonna get bent.

Kirsten:

I teach in my intensive software training classes when I notice that people are

Kirsten:

getting a little crispy, and I'm doing this online so people get crispy fast.

Kirsten:

I will teach people how to curse and Norse, but I teach

Kirsten:

them how to curse in Norse.

Kirsten:

Something that clearly, and I'm upfront about it, means your

Kirsten:

mother wears Roman soldier shoes.

Kirsten:

You know, your mother wears army boots.

Kirsten:

It's not an actual fu kind of curse.

Kirsten:

And I had someone.

Kirsten:

Chew out my contact person for two solid hours about wow.

Kirsten:

How angry she was and how disrespectful and how unprofessional.

Kirsten:

And, and I'm like, well, I'm definitely not the kind of person you wanna

Kirsten:

watch stuff with because I use jokes.

Kirsten:

Yeah.

Kirsten:

And I use jokes professionally.

Kirsten:

And I will do humor professionally as part of my work.

Kirsten:

And if that doesn't work for you, that's fine.

Kirsten:

There are other sessions.

Kirsten:

Yeah.

Kirsten:

But.

Kirsten:

, you know, in person.

Kirsten:

What I used to do is you have a room full of people, right?

Kirsten:

And eventually mm-hmm.

Kirsten:

, you get this look which only works on cameras.

Kirsten:

So just bear with me.

Kirsten:

. Yeah.

Kirsten:

Which is the staring into space.

Kirsten:

10,000 yard.

Kirsten:

And I would notice occasionally, and I would do the, okay,

Kirsten:

I have a Bambi standard.

Kirsten:

This is how I determine brakes.

Kirsten:

I need to see what the Babi score is.

Kirsten:

Let me see how many people are deer in the headlights.

Kirsten:

Yeah.

Kirsten:

Oh, I got a Babi score of four break time.

Kirsten:

Everybody get up, and it worked really well in person.

Kirsten:

I can't do that online, but you need to do something in that moment.

Kirsten:

But I need to do something, so I will do other things.

Kirsten:

Because you have to be able to disconnect people from the spiral they're in,

Kirsten:

especially when they're stressing about, I have to know this material, or I don't

Kirsten:

feel I understand, or they're spinning.

Kirsten:

You have to be able to disconnect that for folks.

Kirsten:

And that's part of being an educator.

Kirsten:

Experienced educators like Kelly and I, we got this in the bag.

Kirsten:

If you're new to the work, you gotta figure out techniques.

Kirsten:

Yeah, humor.

Kirsten:

So that's where we are today.

Kirsten:

You know, and sometimes

Kellie:

though, even experienced educators, miss, I believe you have

Kellie:

a friend J, whose book cover was a joke and, um, too many people didn't

Kirsten:

get it.

Kirsten:

Yeah, so J Schuh is brilliant.

Kirsten:

He is funny, he's charismatic, he is all the things, and he's very creative.

Kirsten:

He's an excellent educator and.

Kirsten:

What's lovely about him is not only is he a good speaker and he is a good

Kirsten:

animator and all the things, but he has a really good sense of humor about himself.

Kirsten:

So he'd done a book on creativity and we interviewed him for the podcast.

Kirsten:

And one of the things is that his book has comic sands as the font on the cover of

Kirsten:

the book for a reason because the core.

Kirsten:

Message of the book is, you know, don't assume.

Kirsten:

Don't assume by what you see, but so many people instantly looked at it

Kirsten:

and did exactly what the message of the book was, which was Don't assume

Kirsten:

And they went, oh my God.

Kirsten:

He used comic sands on his book.

Kirsten:

He obviously doesn't know what creativity is.

Kirsten:

He's obviously just a moron.

Kirsten:

And so the message didn't land, and I'm like, You need to tell people

Kirsten:

that the joke is there in this one.

Kirsten:

That was a little obscure.

Kirsten:

Yeah.

Kirsten:

But he had a good sense of humor about it because he understood.

Kirsten:

He's like, he knew the joke, but the joke there was a, a level

Kirsten:

at which that people missed it.

Kirsten:

And so now, you know, lesson learned, but it's, you know, it happens.

Kirsten:

It happens.

Kirsten:

It does.

Kirsten:

You know, not everything's gonna land.

Kirsten:

So your takeaway was, uh, you know, no, you're lane.

Kirsten:

Yep.

Kirsten:

My takeaway is lean into the power of the dad joke.

Kirsten:

If you don't have anything else, dad jokes are good.

Kirsten:

They're nice and safe.

Kirsten:

Just be aware, you know, humor's tough, humor's really, really hard.

Kirsten:

Drama's hard humor comedy's harder.

Kirsten:

So yes, plan accordingly.

Kellie:

Can I share with you something that our teenager said

Kellie:

the other day that just dropped me

Kirsten:

in

Kellie:

my tracks?

Kellie:

Yes.

Kellie:

So for the audience, 16 year old teenager, very dry sense of

Kellie:

humor, excellent comic timing.

Kellie:

She and I are in the kitchen.

Kellie:

, I'm loading the dishwasher, more dirty dishes than space in the dishwasher,

Kellie:

and I'm trying to jiggle this and juggle that and move a mug, handle

Kellie:

fractionally to the side just to fit something else and beside it.

Kellie:

And at one point she goes, mom, you're going to have to accept that

Kellie:

this is not a dishwasher of holding.

Kellie:

And I fell over

Kellie:

. Kirsten: And for the non-geeks in the

Kellie:

You'll just, we'll put it in the show notes.

Kellie:

We'll put it in the show notes.

Kellie:

That's really good.

Kellie:

Yeah.

Kellie:

Maeve.

Kellie:

Maeve is good.

Kellie:

Yeah.

Kellie:

Brendan has excellent comedic timing.

Kellie:

He's very, very good.

Kellie:

But what I like is that he'll do a lot of the deadpan Really?

Kellie:

And it's like just nails you where he just is like, no, you're not going to get me.

Kellie:

And it's like, yeah, well done sir.

Kellie:

Well played.

Kellie:

All right, so, all right.

Kellie:

What we would like everybody to do is to please, in whatever medium

Kellie:

you are absorbing this, whether it's the audio, whether it's YouTube,

Kellie:

whether whatever, make a comment.

Kellie:

Give us your thoughts.

Kellie:

What is your best Go-to joke, share it with other people.

Kellie:

I'd like to see a whole bunch of jokes and be other people to gather

Kellie:

some new material for all of us.

Kellie:

So, you know.

Kellie:

Kick in.

Kellie:

Have some stuff in there and we will see you all next time.

Kellie:

Thanks for coming.

Kellie:

Cheers.

Kellie:

Bye.

Kellie:

If you enjoyed this conversation about humor and public speaking, check

Kellie:

out Season Three, Episode number 25.

Kellie:

Why Embrace the Beginner Mindset?: Interview with J Schuh?

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Ongoing Mastery: Presenting & Speaking
Presentation and Speaking Skills for Business Leaders

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Kirsten Rourke