Using Humor Appropriately
Well-placed humor keeps an audience engaged and makes a speaker likable, but misplaced humor can undercut a topic's credibility. You'll learn where humor works best in Info and where to avoid it.
Where Humor Works
Light, topic-relevant humor works well in the introduction to build rapport, or as a brief aside after a particularly dense or heavy fact to give the audience a moment to breathe. Self-aware humor about the topic's quirkiness (without mocking the subject's importance) tends to land better than unrelated jokes.
Where to Avoid Humor
Avoid humor during the significance section or any moment discussing genuinely serious stakes (illness, death, tragedy), since a joke there can feel dismissive of real consequences and undercut the speech's credibility. Also avoid humor that requires niche insider knowledge the general audience won't share, since a joke that only a few people get can create an awkward silence.
Testing Humor With a Cold Audience
Because a speaker's own friends often laugh out of familiarity rather than genuine amusement, advanced competitors test jokes specifically on people who have never heard the speech before, since a joke's real effectiveness is best measured by a cold, unfamiliar reaction rather than a friendly, biased one.
A speaker on antibiotic resistance is deciding where to place a light joke about her own paranoia around hand sanitizer.
She places the joke early in her introduction, right after the AGD, to build rapport: 'I've used enough hand sanitizer this year to personally keep Purell in business — and after researching this topic, I don't regret a drop.' She deliberately keeps all humor out of her significance section later, where she discusses real statistics about drug-resistant infection deaths, since a joke there would undercut the gravity of those stakes.
1. Where does light, topic-relevant humor tend to work best in an Info speech?
2. True or False?
"Humor is generally appropriate when discussing a topic's most serious consequences, like illness or death."
Answer all 2 to check.
Use light, topic-relevant humor to build rapport or provide a breather, but avoid it entirely around genuinely serious stakes.