Member Article

That's just not funny...

With Simon Raybould of Curved Vision Theatre

I’m currently writing a customised day’s presentations training for a company in Bath after three days in Germany – and it’s really brought home to me the importance of getting the culture of your presentation right. What works for one audience may very well land you in hot water with another.

Humour is the prime example. It doesn’t travel well so unless you know your audience very, very well indeed it’s a high risk strategy. On the other hand, a presentation with no humour can be deadly indeed!

The tip for handling this kind of issue is to write your presentation “as you normally would” – so that you don’t artificially inhibit yourself – and then go back over it, when you practice, checking that any humour you use follows these guidelines as a starting point:

• no mockery of a group (there will be blondes in your audience, for example) and I know some very intelligent blondes
• no sense of poor sexual taste – if you’re at all unclear about whether your joke is too risky, the answer is certainly “Yes it is!”
• jokes haven’t dated since you thought of them – topical humour is well and good but the same joke won’t work tomorrow as the news agenda will have moved on
• humour isn’t based upon some kind of ‘insider’ slang or shared assumptions – you’d be amazed at how many jokes (almost all of them!) are based upon something unusual happening which flies in the face of the expected. If your idea of what’s expected isn’t the same as your audience’s…

The only safe joke, in short, is pretty well only a self-deprecating one – but even then be careful that your audience don’t agree with you when you talk about your bad dress sense, or whatever it is!

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ruth Mitchell .