If you choose to use humor in the upcoming public speaking event, then know that people really like entertaining speeches. At least you have used humor especially when talking to your friends, work colleagues or family members. You made them laugh, switching their moods from sadness or boredom to cheerfulness. Some people say that they have got no sense of humor but that is quite untrue.
When it comes to speeches especially long ones, people tend to lose their attention. They become bored by the person giving a long speech even some go as far as yawning and sleeping. How does it feel when you're the one delivering a speech and half of your audience are sleep and the rest by their appearance are very bored? It is always good to read the minds of your audience so as you know what exactly to do in order to capture their attention and keep them interested till you're done with your speech.
Humor captures the attention of the audience. It makes them want to hear more and more of what the speaker is saying with hopes of finding something funny that will make them laugh and on the process they get the message that the speaker is passing across. The point is people love to be entertained. In public speaking or any other presentation, humor can do a lot of things. Here are some of the things that humor does:
1.) Humor creates connections. People can relax and take in the information better. Humor is positive and people are attracted to positive things always.
2.) Humor makes you more approachable and likable. People will perceive you as being down to earth.
3.) In public speaking, humor helps keep the attention span of the audience. If you use humor in your speech, your audience will be attentive listening to your speech and they'll want to hear more.
4.) Humor will make your speech more interesting. People simply love laughter.
5.) Humor helps to highlight points in your speech that you need the audience to remember. Just like we remember movie scenes that are humorous, people are likely to remember humorous points of your speech.
6.) In public speaking, humor removes hostility of the audience. It is impossible for the audience to be hostile when they're being engaged with humor. Humor is disarming and it lightens the mood.
7.) Humor helps to work as a bridge or a connection for your topic points.
8.) Humor helps to create mental pictures in the minds of your listeners. This is especially true for self-deprecating humor.
9.) People remember humorous presentations and they remember someone who made them laugh.
10.) In public speaking, humor helps a heavy topic to "go down" much easier. It is hard for people to digest sad or too long topics. Humor helps to sweeten a message or to take things off edge.
11.) In public speaking, humor can work to get you more sales and better evaluations because it helps to warm-up people to act on what you tell them.
12.) Humor just makes people happy. People want to enjoy what you have to say. You can take a dry and dull speech and turn it into a sparkling and happy moment by the use of humor.
To conclude, humor is important in public speaking as it helps to make connections with the audience thus getting a positive result from the audience.
The author of this article is Joshua Nyamache and together with other team members they are working on Nikenya website, a website that you read articles about the contentious issues of all time.