The secret of humor, how to shake off the baggage on stage

In this lecture, I want to help you train your sense of humor.

A good speech requires humor. With humor, it is easier to become a super speaker.

The miraculous effects of humor

Let me talk about the relationship between humor and speech. There is a kind of speech where being funny is the goal of the speech. This kind of speech is called talk show. For most speakers, you don’t have to practice to the point where you can make jokes all over your mouth, but humor is also a super weapon that can get twice the result with half the effort, and it’s the icing on the cake.

How to understand it? You know, the three challenges you always face and need to solve in your speech are: attention drift, cognitive load, and emotional desynchronization. This means that listeners are prone to slipping away, listeners are cognitively lazy, and listeners will not easily produce emotional responses.

How to overcome these three challenges? A good answer to one against three is humor.

Humor does wonders for these three challenges. Simply put, humor can quickly bring you closer to your audience and grab their attention.

Laughter is the instinct of human survival. Although it is impossible to scientifically define why people laugh, through induction, we can find that in two situations, the audience is likely to laugh with a high probability. One is to create a sense of superiority; the other is to release tension, that is, you surprised him.

Therefore, when we want to create humor in our speeches, we can think about these two principles: one is to make the audience feel superior, and the other is to create logical surprises.

How to make the audience feel superior? The simplest way is for the speaker to shame himself and make the audience think he is better than you. Let me give you an example. One of my common speeches starts like this:

"Fourteen years ago, I started my business. At that time, I had one goal for myself: I want to become a leader in the entrepreneurial circle. Aaron Kwok; I create things and make people, fourteen years later, I finally became the one in the entrepreneurial circle... Guo Degang"

After this beginning, if you think about it, the psychological distance between us and the audience can still be Far away?

So, what are logical accidents? This actually requires no explanation. Don’t you understand the surprise? Let me give you an example:

A certain company has a new engineer born in the 1990s who is particularly capable. The treatment given by the company is good, and everyone agrees. Unexpectedly, a week later, the post-90s generation insisted on resigning. The boss asked in confusion, and the child said: "There is no other reason, the front desk is too ugly."

Self-deprecation, puns, and serious nonsense

< p> Let’s enter the practical part, how to become a humorous speaker? Today I will teach you a few tricks to achieve quick success. Remember these three points:

1. Laugh at yourself.

You can use an innocuous flaw in your speech as a meme, but please be careful not to offend others present.

In a speech at Jiangnan University in his hometown, Yu Minhong joked about himself in a slow tone: "When I left the water town of Jiangnan at the age of 18, I looked like this, and I still look like this now. Our appearance is the biggest. The advantage is that it can withstand the wind and sand in the north." The students in the audience applauded loudly and gave it to Principal Yu Minhong who dared to make fun of himself.

2. A pun.

For example, actor Hu Ge talked about the TV series "Xuanyuan Sword" in an interview. Hu Ge said "Xuanyuan Sword" is a very interesting TV series. One is that the clothes worn during the filming were very thick, and it was filmed in summer, so there will be a strong smell of sweat on the body; the other is that this is a "tasteful" TV series that is worth savoring, pondering, and watching.

3. Talk nonsense seriously.

Let me share with you a personal case:

When I was a child, my father hoped that I could not only study, but also practice martial arts. But he had never practiced martial arts, so he taught himself and bought some books in the market.

That day I finally read a good book - "The Eighteen Palms of the Dragon". Then the two of us started practicing, and we were able to practice for three months. After practicing, the old man went out to buy another book. The second book was called "Nine Yin Manual". I have been practicing this book for several months.

Then one day my father came back and he was not very happy. I said, what books did you buy again today? Open it and read "Sunflower Collection".

In fact, this story is just serious nonsense, but it played a huge role in the speech. In this story, the audience was not misled by the Nine Yin Manual, the Eighteen Palms of the Dragon, and the Sunflower Book. He can actually understand the expectations of a hard-hearted father for his children to become successful.

How to train humor in daily life

The above is a quick way to invent and create jokes. If you are willing to improve your humorous expression skills over time, I would also like to suggest you do the following three things:

Article 1: Save inventory.

This is actually the same thing as the "input" and "information reserve" we talked about before, except that you need to expand the collected materials from golden sentences to paragraphs. Pay attention to funny, amusing, and humorous materials in your daily life, especially the top ten jokes of the year, collect them, and ponder them over and over again.

I once saw a joke about what a man in science and engineering is? I once made an appointment with my beloved girlfriend on what day, what time, and where. When the day arrived, I packed up and saw that it was still early. I could still play Honor of Kings. As soon as I started playing, time flew by. When I thought about the date, more than an hour had passed. At that time, the man in science and engineering even slapped himself in the mouth and scolded himself while doing so. He was such a fucking bastard and had no future. He couldn't even concentrate on playing a game.

Later, when I introduced a very good founder who was a programmer at an innovator conference, I deliberately used this joke. At this time, not only was the scene very joyful, but the founder also cared for me for a long time with a "you understand me" look in his eyes.

Article 2: Test more.

Once you memorize the joke, don’t think it is yours. You still have to practice speaking more. To polish a work, a professional crosstalk actor needs forty or fifty live trials before he can master the baggage and rhythm of a new piece. In other words, the same joke material, if grasped well, will be humorous, but if grasped poorly, it will be embarrassing.

The core method of how to avoid embarrassing jokes is to practice deliberately, summarize feedback in a timely manner, create opportunities for yourself, and actively observe the audience's feedback.

I once had a story about making a joke on Professor Li Shanyou. Li Shanyou is the founder of Chaos University. The story is like this:

It took Professor Shanyou’s wife half a year to finally get her driver’s license. The family was very happy to celebrate. Professor Shanyou said: Wife, I will take you to see the car tomorrow. . The next day I went to a 4S store, first to Tesla, then to Maserati, Maybach, and Porsche. The professor's wife was very excited, looked at her husband affectionately, and said: Husband, it seems that starting a company will make a lot of money. Thank you, we don't need to be so luxurious, right? Just buy a Mercedes-Benz or BMW or something. Professor Shanyou looked at his wife affectionately and said: Wife, if you want to think different, I show you these cars because I want to tell you that you must remember these car logos and never forget these cars when driving on the road in the future. Damn, it's too expensive to repair.

You see, when I told this joke above, I actually used some techniques: In this joke, the repetition of two "affectionate" words is very important, which creates a strong contrasting effect and quickly inspires users to reach the point of laughter. ; In addition, after the wife finished speaking, there was a pause between the husband's reply. The optimal length of this pause is two to three seconds, which can create a "logical surprise."

Behind these little tips, I have practiced this joke at least 10 times on different occasions.

Article 3: Imagine more scenarios that you may encounter to train yourself to adapt accordingly.

Humor is an excellent defense mechanism when encountering difficulties. A lot of live humor comes from improvisation, let's take a look at former US President Clinton.

Clinton played the saxophone well. Once when he gave a campaign speech on CNN (American Cable News Network), the host ridiculed him: "Besides bragging, what else can you brag about? After hearing this, Clinton confidently took out the saxophone hidden behind his back and replied: "I can also play this." Immediately, Clinton showed off his special skills and played several famous songs in one breath. It was a miracle.

How to adapt to changing circumstances? To be honest, this mainly depends on the "CPU computing power" and knowledge structure of the brain. In other words, talent is very important, but there are still tricks. Let me tell you the key points:

Always prepare yourself of versatile jokes. Like wild stories, the goal of wild jokes is to create laughter anytime, anywhere. These versatile jokes can consciously and actively use IP. The IP mentioned here refers to the latest works of netizens that are seasonal and popular.

The quality of netizens’ works today is really amazing. Why is this happening? There is a term in physics called "parallel connection". What one person's brain is thinking about is incomparable to the jokes that a million netizens' brains can come up with in parallel.

Summary of this lecture

This lecture talks about how to improve your ability to express humor. You need to do three things: increase the stock of jokes; test and practice from time to time; and develop the ability to adapt to changes.

In the next lesson, I will teach you how to create wonderful slides for a wonderful speech.