Women using humour: does it work for public speaking?
After the recent and somewhat controversial post on here about women and humour, I said I would follow up with some thoughts culled from one of my books (Wedding Speeches For Women) on the differences in the ways women can use humour effectively – as opposed to how men do it.
In that earlier post I posed a question about “whether women can make as good use of humour, especially in speeches and presentations, as men can … and if not, why not?”
It will come as no surprise to you that despite asking the question I do have very strong views on that, but they’re based not so much on whether the speaker is male or female, but more on whether the speaker (whatever gender) is naturally funny or not.
There’s nothing more excruciating than listening to either a man or a woman telling a joke in a speech when they don’t have the knack for delivering it, or if it is inappropriate for the audience and gets no more than a polite chuckle from the event organizer and embarrassed coughs from everyone else.
When I’m writing speeches for clients who are not natural comedians, I always advise them to avoid trying to be funny because it will fall flat. Far better to be interesting, engaging, sincere and if relevant, emotive. Much as British audiences enjoy a good joke, humour is not the be-all and end-all of successful public speaking. Humour is a condiment that can add spice to a speech or presentation; but just like any other condiment, it can ruin whatever it’s sprinkled on if it’s wrong for the job.
Women are more subtle at making people laugh
Public Speaking training
In the case of mixed audiences as you would get at a wedding, bar mitzvah or other social event, I have to say I can understand how some people, especially older ones, might be offended to hear a woman tell bawdy, blue jokes in a speech. In the case of a wedding that’s probably the domain of the best man if there is one – not because it’s a masculine privilege, but because it’s boring to all but the few drunken rugby types at the back of the room.
Anyway as you can imagine there is a vast difference between that, and being amusing. In some ways I think women speech makers have an easier job of making audiences laugh, because they can get a laugh on a much more subtle level than men can – especially from the other women in the audience. Women do not need four-letter words or side-slapping hysterics; with just a smile and a few choice words you can bring the house down.
It is perhaps because of the old fashioned expectation that men will be funny in a speech and women will not, that women can get laughs more easily. That’s especially true if she personalizes the humour – and there are ways to cheat that one. Take this example of a Chief Bridesmaid talking about the hen night…
Original joke (quite a well-known one)
The food in this hotel is disgusting. What could I do about it?
You’d better bring it up at the New Guests’ Welcome Meeting.
Personalised version
Some of you here will remember that Cassie’s “hen” night was quite an occasion … although my memories of it aren’t all that clear after about the seventh glass of champagne. Anyway one thing I do remember though was that breakfast the next morning was awful … greasy, cold scrambled eggs and undercooked kippers. I remember poor Cassie complaining about it and I told her not to worry, we would all bring it up as soon as I could find the manager.
Anyway, enough of the joke crafting! For now, anyway.
Women’s public speaking: what are the other issues?
Whereas all the criteria of how to compose, write and prepare a speech itself are of course identical whoever you are, there are a few “on-stage” considerations specifically for women.
In Wedding Speeches For Women I was very lucky to get some advice from a top drama coach/teacher, Gail Cornish, who came up with some very useful tips about women in public speaking. Here are a few short excerpts from that …
- A woman’s voice tends to travel and project better than a man’s because it is lighter and higher. However, this can tend to give her less “authority” when speaking.
- An untrained female speaker should concentrate on keeping her voice as low in pitch as possible (without sounding Margaret Thatcherish!) to avoid any shrillness.
- When practising her speech, she should do breathing exercises (the breath is the “petrol”, so to speak, for the voice engine – most people breathe too shallowly), facial warm up exercises, vocal warm up exercises and practice speaking to the end of a room, to the end of the garden, speaking while the radio is playing – all of these can help to keep the volume up.
- Also practise speaking slowly. Record yourself doing the speech – you will probably be speaking too fast. Go at half the speed that you think feels right – then halve it again – that will probably be about right for public speaking!
- Practice status: say the speech with your toes turned inward, your shoulders hunched, looking down or flicking your eyes around, touching your face and hair frequently. Then drop all those behaviours. Say the speech standing straight, looking straight ahead and sweeping your eyes slowly around from one side to the other, keeping your hands and head straight and still.
Hope you find that helpful.
This post is sponsored by Public Speaking Training Co, Curved Vision
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Suzan St Maur Reply:
January 20th, 2010 at 7:02 pm
Absolutely right Linda – everything you say about the role of the speechwriter is bang on.
The most important issue, I think, is that a speechwriter needs to metamorphose into the speaker (or at least his or her personality!) so the material is written in the way the speaker would speak it naturally.
Tricky though it sounds it’s actually not that difficult; you just need to spend a bit of time getting to know the person as a person rather than as a client, perhaps recording him/her speaking informally, so you understand what they will be comfortable with saying in the speech. It’s just like getting into a character’s way of speaking when you’re writing dialogue for fiction/drama.
I never forget being interviewed for a radio programme once, about speech making. The producers had hired some supposedly expert speechwriter (not me – I was there as an external “expert” to comment) to write a speech for this man who stood up and delivered it. The speech was well structured and well written, but dull. After that the speaker opened the session up for questions, and replied to them with witty, amusing humour and flair – completely different in style to that of the speech.
Eventually the presenter came up to me and my co-commentator (a journalist from the Daily Mirror,) stuck a microphone up my nose, and asked me what I thought of the presentation. I said I thought it was very good indeed, but it was shame it had been written for somebody else and not the man we listened to.
There was a long silence. The Daily Mirror man spluttered into his beer, chortling “what a f***ing shame this show isn’t going out live.” I have a funny feeling my interview ended up on the cutting room floor, so to speak, and needless to say I was never asked to comment for that production company again. The Emperor’s New Clothes and all that.
Most of my clients like the way I can write “in their personal style” and that skill now works when I edit books, too – the authors come back to me and say “it’s much better, reads better, yet it still sounds like me.”
Rocket science? Nope. Just 20 years’ hard-but-fun grind as an advertising copywriter, where you learn to write in myriad different “voices…”
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