Whether you are naturally funny or you have to add humour from an external source, it would be fair to say that you should deliberately learn to be funny. Or, more specifically, you should have an understanding of how your funny works.
The important thing to remember is that you want to create your speech and find the humour first. You need to write from the heart, by that I mean you just want to put pen to paper as quickly as you can. Don’t think too much about what you’re writing, otherwise you’ll end up second guessing and convincing yourself that you cannot learn to be funny.
When it comes time for you to edit what you’re saying, then the tips provided in this article could help you edit from the head. At this point you can unleash your inner critic to help.
I’ve met people who are really funny who still don’t know what a punchline is, so I am going to give you a brief explanation of set-up lines and punchlines and some tips to improve each.
Set-up Lines Secrets
Fundamentally a set-up line is the bit before you get a laugh. It’s often quite straight and provides the all important information required to make the punchline work. I think that it’s fair to say that the set-up line is equally important, if not more so, than the punchline. Without the set-up line the punchline is nothing.
Consider this joke:
“A grandmother is watching her grandson play on the beach. A huge wave crashes and sweeps the grandson out to sea. She says: “please God, save my only grandson, I beg of you.” Suddenly another wave brings the boy back completely unharmed. The grandmother looks up and says: “he had a hat”".
Everything up until the word “says” is the set-up. It provides the necessary mini story and helps to orientate us.
Ideally, the shorter this part the better. You want to get to the punchline as fast as you can, but without rushing your delivery. You should still be speaking in your own natural rhythm and pace.
If you consider that the average headline stand-up comedian gets 4-6 laughs per minute, a joke of this nature probably wouldn’t achieve that. In order to achieve that there would need to be a punchline every three sentences, or one laugh every 10 seconds.
As you can see I am very serious when it comes to learning to be funny.
Joke stories, such as the one of just outlined, tend to be a little long-winded and have only one punchline at the end. That’s a lot of time taken and a lot of faith to have in that one punchline working.
Whilst these type of jokes could work in a speech or presentation you should make sure that you speak them out loud a few times in order to put them into your own words. By doing that you will naturally find yourself editing the joke.
Obviously, when you are delivering a presentation everything you say is not divided into either set-up lines or punchlines. You’re not a comedian. You’re someone giving a presentation that uses humour to help make your point.
However, when you get to the humour, you want to get to the laugh as quickly as possible. As Shakespeare said “brevity is the soul of wit” and he was right.
Punchline Secrets
When you go over your punchlines they want to be short and to the point. This is where you get the punch of the line. Consider the previous punchline and imagine what it would be like if it was like this:
“My goodness. I can’t believe you missed something so fundamental. What looks different about my grandson? Isn’t it obvious? He had a hat”.
If you think that the set-up line serves to create tension of expectation in the audience, the punchline should be terse enough to release that tension. But if the punchline rambles on like in my above example, then that effect is lost.
In effect all that sentiment that we see in everything in the example sentence, from the words my to obvious, is built in to the four words he had a hat.
When you’re reviewing your punchline you should also make sure that the key word is as close to the end of the sentence as possible. It helps keep the tension for as long as possible and can often be a surprise when it’s delivered. The surprise being another key element in releasing tension. If the line was:
“His hat is missing”
You may get the laugh and you may not. The keyword in this sentence is hat. That is the most important thing for the grandmother. But if we end with the word missing, we have to try to unravel her point.
These tips that I’ve provided here can not only be applied to the editing of street jokes, but also to most other forms of spoken humour including stand-up. If you can apply these tips you can learn to be funny and improve the funny you already have.
Jason Peck is a Humorist, Speaker and Coach based in London, England. For more humour techniques, tips and secrets, check out Jason’s Learn to be Funny hub page Learn to be Funny
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