Take This Joke. Please.

22nd February, 2010 - Posted by janebeard - 1 Comment

We’ve met countless speakers who believe that telling a joke is a great way to break the ice with an audience.

It doesn’t. All it does is break our hope that your presentation will be different from the others we’ve sat through.

For every time it’s worked to start with a joke, there are thousands of times it didn’t. And that’s thousands of lost opportunities to grab us — out here in your audience — when you have our best attention.

Don’t believe us? Join us out here in the audience for a moment please:

The presentation is about to start. We’re in our chairs, ready to learn something useful, something interesting. We are hoping that THIS meeting will be a good use of our time. And then we hear the speaker wind up to make us laugh: “A funny thing happened to me on the way over here…”

How far back in your head do your eyes roll? Is your groan audible, or do you keep it private?

The way to break the ice – really break it – is to make us see right away that the time we’re about to spend with a presenter is going to be worth it. And the way to do THAT is to skip the things that make the speaker comfortable (jokes, extended thanks to and praise for the previous speaker, thanking the audience for being there, or even apologizing for not being prepared enough).

Instead, leap to the things that make US comfortable:

- Tell us what we’re about to learn (“We want you to understand how we’re changing the way we work with vendors, and the timetable for making these changes.”)
- Set an interesting context for the presentation (“You may think that our most valuable asset is our number-one selling Product X. But we have an asset that much more valuable even than that – and it’s the people who work for us everyday.”)
- Tell us what we’ll be able to do at the end of the presentation (“In the next 15 minutes, you’ll learn something that will change the way you approach customers from now on.”)

We’ve heard jokes that do work – but it’s because they relate directly to what the speaker wants us to do at the end of the presentation.

For example, we’ve worked with a lawyer who has to give an annual “compliance” presentation. His job is to remind a sales force what the law allows in terms of customer interaction, so they can avoid the kinds of behaviors that tend to result in major fines, if not jail time. He knew that the audience expected a deadly and dry presentation. So he poked fun at his profession a bit by having the music from “Jaws” play him on stage.

We watched a detailed financial report launched with the words, “I know you are love numbers and charts as much as I do, and you can’t wait to see them up on this screen – so let’s get right to this financial report.”

In both cases, the speaker sent the message, “I know you expect this to be painful, and I’m going do my best NOT to meet the expectation.” The “joke” was on point, diffused tension in the room, took less than 30 seconds to deliver…and delivered the audience right to the door of the actual message.

Most jokes just are meant to buy time for the speaker to adjust to the fact that they are standing in front of an audience. We say, adjust on your own time.

So, skip the opening joke. And start with whatever you’d say next.

1 Comment

Jennifer

March 17th, 2010 at 9:06 AM    


great article! I agree: as an audience member I decide quickly how much attention I will devote to a speaker (we all have a lot of thoughts competing for mind-share during the day!) That first minute of a presentation is critical to convince me that 100% of my attention is what I’ll give. A joke doesn’t do it; why I should be there does. Thanks for reminding me of this for my next presentation.

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