As the TM contest season approaches, I’m going to look at how to make a winning Toastmasters Humorous speech. Unlike the International Speech Contest advice I gave, which I had no business giving given I hadn’t competed in one, I’ve actually done humorous. I made it to Division, where a combination of me telling Gandhi and Mother Theresa jokes to a conservative audience and being up against an amazing 15 year veteran Toastmaster did me in. My speech was memorable - for better or worse - and four years later people still remember me as the Nobel Peace Prize guy.

 

Anyway the point here isn’t my success or lack thereof, but that I’m not a hypocrite for a change. I’m digressing.

 

In the next few posts I’ll walk through some common mistakes I’ve seen people make come contest time and some smart things I’ve seen done, too. To set expectations, I can’t make you funny if you’re not.
These posts are about winning your humorous speech contest, with a few random thoughts about being funny thrown in. Being a sneaky Toastmaster, I can share some advice about how to win against people who may be better than you.

 

In the next few posts, I’ll be looking at:

• RTFM, Part II
  
• Practice, Part II
• It Ain’t Standup
• Funny Title, Funny Opening
• TMs are Conservative
• The approximate text of my humorous speech
• An analysis of why I got run over at the Division level
• Maybe some other random stuff if I can think of it and I’m not too lazy

There are a few common phrases that we over-use inside Microsoft.

 

“So” - I went to a daylong public speaking class once and the guy running it, a professional coach, said that most Microsofties began way too many of their sentences with “so.” I’d never noticed it (this was before I was in TM), but he’s right. I’ve never had a problem with uhms or ahhs but I still screw this one up all the time, despite +5 years as a Toastmaster.

 

I’ve heard two theories as to why we do this. The first is that we’re a bunch of laid back Northwest guys. “So, like, did you like the hiking trip?” The other is that we’re overly excited Microsoft types that start talking before we think and use “so” as our “uhm” equivalent. “So… like I have this really cool idea that I was thinking of. So do you have time to talk to me about it now? So…”

 

It’s interesting that laid-back Northwest and over ambitious Microsoftie don’t gel. Maybe it’s just that we (the US, not MS) are collectively ruining English.

 

“Impactful” - I don’t know why I dislike this one so much but I do. It started as only something some high level VP type or marketing guy would say. It seems to slowly be creeping its way down the corporate ladder. I’ve heard mid level managers that I really respect using it recently. Maybe at some point in the distant past George Washington or Rockefeller or a Roman Emperor or some other big wig began every sentence with “so” and the rest of us have picked it up from him, too.

 

I’m not alone in this opinion. From here:

 

Impactful: A non-existent word coined by corporate advertising, marketing and business drones to make their work sound far more useful, exciting and beneficial to humanity than it really is. This term is most frequently used in “team building” seminars and conferences in which said drones discuss the most effective ways to convince consumer zombies to purchase crap they clearly do not need or even want.

 

“Messaged” - Speaking of me almost screwing up, this blog is motivated by my near use of the word “messaged” this week. Not like instant-messaged. Instead:

 

“It has been messaged to me that need to keep this secret and that was messaged to my boss from the VP.”

 

Instead of saying “been messaged”, I could also say “told.” And instead of could, let’s say should or even better use “told.” As in, “My boss told me to keep this secret since his boss told him.”

 

First off, told is better because it’s active rather than a passive “been messaged.” But messaged is even worse than that. It feels like some PC game — politically correct, not the other PC games MS cares about. If my boss tells me something, it reminds me that he’s my boss who has the right to tell me stuff. We’re supposed to be one big happy family where information doesn’t get told down the hierarchy, but instead where we receive passive messaging.

 

Mind you that if I don’t do what the messaging tells me, I’ll be told I screwed up come bonus time no matter how they spin it.

–

 

We should get “impactful” and “messaged” to be like “synergy.” I’m too much the realist to think we can have as much luck with sentence opening “so”, but we can try.

 

So I hope my messaging on all this has will impactful.

Today I evaluated an Ice Breaker speech. The woman who presented was very good and very funny - we heard how she learned how to operate a particle accelerator and ride a unicycle in college and how a boss fell asleep when she was giving a speech and a few days later told her, “Your speech was great!”

 

I encouraged the speaker that as she worked her way through the CC manual to pay close attention to the projects and to swing for the fences on them. The speaker today stood with her hands on lectern the whole time - one of the few things she did wrong - so I said to go crazy on the “Your Body Speaks” speech. I don’t believe in going overdoing it in most outside TM situations. But the point of the manual is that you should push yourself beyond the comfort zone in TM so you know what works and what doesn’t when it matters. And on the offshoot you’re ever on Oprah and you want to jump on a couch and start screaming, moving around so much won’t feel so strange.

 

The “look at future manual speeches” is also good when a beginning speaker does a number of things wrong. I’m not going to get up and tell a nervous new speaker, “Please work on your gestures, vocal variety, props, and eye contact - all get all that figured out by your next speech.” It takes multiple speeches to get all this stuff even halfway working for most of us, and some of us are still working at it, and the manual can help.

 

I didn’t do my basic manual like this. I had a speech I wanted to give and did a half-ass bolting on of the speech goal to make it work. In my “Use Visual Aids” speech, I brought in a crappy three dollar plastic sword, held it for ten seconds during my opening, and then put it down and talked about what I was going to anyway. I didn’t learn too much about visual aids beyond how not to use them with an effort like that.

 

A cohort told me how great my evaluation was for encouraging speakers to look to future projects. Unfortunately I admitted that I stole my material from someone else. I should’ve kept my mouth shut. As I work my way through the Competent Self-Aggrandizement Manual, I’ll get to the “Taking Credit for Other’s Ideas” project soon enough.

For some reason I was thinking of Life Is Worth Living, a 50’s & 60’s Catholic TV show with Bishop Fulton J Sheen recently. I’ve seen a few episodes and the good Bishop is very entertaining, without coming off too slick like the modern televangelist.

 

I looked it up again and one of the links is on TBN, which despite being an Evangelical station does show it from time to time. From their website…

 

 
 

So what’s wrong with this picture?

 

At first I was drawn to Kirk Cameron’s name as someone you may like if you like Bishop Sheen. Somehow Bishop Sheen, who received a doctorate in philosophy and was a really deep thinker, doesn’t seem to draw the same audience as the star of Growing Pains.

 

There’s a more obvious one, though. If you like Bishop Sheen, apparently you’ll like Pastor John Hagee too. This is the same Pastor Hagee who got McCain into trouble for all his virulently anti-Catholic statements!

 

Last post I thought about club website reliability. You should also make sure your club website doesn’t mix learned Catholic bishops, sitcom stars, and (alleged) anti-Catholic Evangelicals on the same page.

A few months ago I was invited to speak at a club thirty miles from me. I went to their website to get a rough idea of how long it’d take me to get down there a few nights before. The day of the meeting, I went to the website to print out the directions and — nothing. The website was down. Yikes!

 

I guessed that our District website would have directions and they did, so the story had a happy ending. Except… it wouldn’t have had a happy ending had I not known about the District website, which many Toastmasters don’t.

 

The problem is that the website was being provided by a local technology company free of charge, with the caveat that it wasn’t guaranteed to be up %100 of the time because they were using it as a test website themselves. I provided “positive feedback” (I griped) and they’ve since fixed it. There are plenty of free website hosting sites out there, and anything less than %100 isn’t good enough.

Do you want to start out a meeting with “Let’s all introduce ourselves” at the beginning? I’m not a huge fan of this in general because it can get kind of out of control time wise (or very out of control), even with a small crowd, unless you’re careful.

 

Three little anecdotes about this follow. I’m not sure if there’s a common thread but they’re amusing in their own way.

 

1 — I’m reading Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of A Man Who Rescued A Million Yiddish Books, a really fun book about Aaron Lansky, an American Jewish guy, who fell in love with old Yiddish books and spends his life saving them.

 

In one of the early scenes when his organization is first getting started, Lansky calls together a meeting of those interested in helping him. The group is made up of young people, early-mid 20’s, “long-hairs”, and very old New York Jews. He starts the meeting by saying, “Let’s go around the room and introduce ourselves.”

 

I started laughing right away. Lansky says it was a big mistake in his next sentence. His audience liked talking so much that it took an hour and a half to get through the twelve of them! He had of course just meant for the name and a sentence or two.

 

(Incidentally I’m listening to audio tape of this and the narrator, George Guidall, is amazing. He does the old Yiddish man and woman accents so you can tell they’re Yiddish but without stereotyping. He can have multiple Yiddish old men conversing and sound distinct from one another and Yiddish at the same time. His pacing and volume control are also out of the park, too.)

 

2 — About a month ago my club was dead silent about five minutes before the meeting began. There were maybe twenty people sitting around the table dead quiet and it was kind of awkward. So one of the club members said we should say our name and how long we’ve been in Toastmasters. Toastmasters may not be as talkative as old Yiddish speakers, but most of us spent a lot longer than the few moments that “My name is Joe Schmo and I’ve been in Toastmasters three years.”

 

We started the meeting five minutes late in the end because the intros ran over and had to cut table topics way short thanks to long winded main speeches. Given there was only one guest and they wouldn’t have remembered half the names anyway, I’m not convinced going around and doing the intro at the beginning of a TM meeting is a good idea unless you’re very disciplined about it.

 

I do like guests getting to introduce themselves so they feel welcome, but this should be a much quicker job.

 

3 — The one time I saw the intros work really well was when I was on jury duty. We had to fill out a questionnaire with our name/occupation/age/interests and a few other disqualifying type questions. Then all forty potential jurors had to get up and say their name and occupation and then be quiet. The lawyers had our filled out questionnaires in their possession and would ask us maybe one or two questions about our hobbies to warm us up. Then they asked hypotheticals such as, “If the police came to your house would you let them in?”

 

We moved through all of this very quickly and without much incident, given how many of us there were and how much we had to cover.

 

I was tempted to get myself disqualified as a juror by saying something crazy. My dad, a lawyer, told me once that the magic formula was to say, “That bastard looks guilty to me.” I didn’t. Nor did anyone give their life story, tell why they joined Toastmasters, take half an hour explain their love of Yiddish books, or anything like that. And the reason was… there was that Judge fellow sitting above us who didn’t look like he wanted to hear it.

Daisy celebrates with her diploma from the class.

From the American Kennel Club website, the Canine Good Citizen (CGC) is:

a certification program that is designed to reward dogs who have good manners at home and in the community. The Canine Good Citizen Program is a two-part program that stresses responsible pet ownership for owners and basic good manners for dogs. All dogs who pass the 10-step CGC test may receive a certificate from the American Kennel Club.

 

I’m proud to announce that Daisy Spaith is the newest Canine Good Citizen! After five weeks of classes for the test at the local Humane Society, I figured Daisy’s chances of passing were about one in five. The test is pretty hard and she’s too friendly for test items like “sit until a human calls you” or “stay mellow when another dog is nearby.” So not only is passing a big deal, but doing it against the odds is even better.

 

My secret was that I wore her out today. We had about four miles of walks (two with a weight pack full) and maybe forty five minutes of fetch in a huge dog park. I also signed up to take the test last, since I wanted Daisy to be able to chill with the other dogs nearby, get used to the training facility again, and be mellow when she took it. Ironically the test she scared me the most on was when she refused to lay down. It took about five requests to finally get her to go down. I can usually take her from a running like crazy to a dead stop and lay down in about half a second, so if she’d failed on this one and not the really hard ones it would’ve been disappointing.

 

Of the four dogs that took the test tonight, three passed and the other guy should have but has been nervous the last few weeks due to one of his owners being out of town. I’ll give a ton of credit to our instructor, Ali Johnson, who held us to ridiculously high standards so that the actual test itself wasn’t so bad.

 

 

Daisy carrying her diploma and tennis ball she won. I didn’t stage this one.

Daisy loves people so much that I’m going to look into getting her into therapy dog work. She’s passed the first hurdle, but it gets harder from here on. We wouldn’t want her knocking someone over with a cane now, would we?

Some clubs begin their meetings with the club president reading out the club mission statement of the Toastmasters organization as the very, very first thing. It goes like this:

 

The mission of a Toastmasters club is to provide a mutually supportive and positive learning environment in which every member has the opportunity to develop communication and leadership skills, which in turn foster self-confidence and personal growth.

 

An inspiring and a great way to kick things off! It sounds really good, right?

 

No.

 

The words above look good written down and I do think capture what Toastmasters is (or should be) about accurately. But try reading the phrase out loud. It doesn’t roll off the tongue and it doesn’t create a lot of excitement. Remember, we’re talking about clubs where this is the very first thing they do. As in, “Please be seated everyone. [Pause] The mission of a Toastmasters club…”

 

The next problem is that I’ve never seen anyone who has memorized that long block of text. So the opener has to read it off a sheet of paper, making 0 audience connection in the process.

 

The president’s main job at the very start of the meeting is to call everyone to order and then get the energy going. A simple but excited, “Hey, how y’all doin’?” with good eye contact and a smile is a much better opening than “The mission of a Toastmasters club…”. If you want to get to reading the mission statement, put it off until after the club is warmed up a little. Just get through it quickly so you don’t cool off the audience.

 

I’m not a fan of reading it all, however, because it’s so dry. It’s appropriate for officer meetings where the Toastmaster geeks popup and it helps frame the conversation, but if I’m going to get up and give a speech about my trip to Arizona and Hawaii I’d rather have a warmed up audience than one that’s vaguely inspired with the TM mission.

 

If you insist on being all inspiring in your opening, I’d ditch the TM opening and keep it informal and energetic. I think of the opening of the old Fat Albert cartoons, where Bill Cosby says you’ll have a good time and if you’re not careful, you might learn something.

I may have just got hooked on America’s Greatest Dog. The premise is that 12 dogs and their owners move into a mansion together and have to compete on various obedience activities, with one dog/owner couple voted out each week.

 

It’s a very smart idea and the premiere got good ratings. There’s like +70 million dogs in the US and more dog lovers. More than that, a lot of the viewing audience comes in with prejudices about breeds. My dog, Daisy, is a Border Collie mix, and it turns out there’s a BC mix, Galaxy, on the show. Galaxy’s other half is pointer, I think Daisy’s other half is a working English Springer Spaniel.

 

There is a lot of resemblance between Galaxy and Daisy looks wise. Galaxy is on the top and then left, Daisy on the bottom and then right below.

 

 

 

My favorite owner was a New York Jewish guy who got forced to sleep outside in the “dog house” after the first contest. He had a lot of smartass comments, like how the doghouse would rent for $2000 a month in NYC or how New York Jews weren’t much on camping. He also threw a Bark Mitzvah for his dog when he turned 13 in dog years. His dog is a terrier. Go figure, since I’ve never met a terrier I liked or that liked me.

 

The second contest of the episode was a talent show. I was amazed that one of the judges was Victoria Stilwell, who is the British Caesar Milan. Unlike Caesar, she gives treats and rewards rather than bossing the dogs around. Victoria gave advice to the various owners whose dogs misbehaved during the evaluation section. The lady Victoria screamed at the most was someone who pushed her dog’s behind down to make her sit. It made me chuckle to imagine Caesar Milan had he been a judge. I could see him walking up on stage in the middle of the contest itself and sh’ng people’s misbehaving dogs and grabbing them the collar and jerking them. Maybe in season two Caesar can show up. Who knows, maybe John and Daisy can be on season 2, also.

I’m a big believer in books on tape, or Automobile University as Zig Ziglar calls it. The last few weeks I’ve abandoned two series in a row, which is a first for me.

 

The first set of tapes was a TeachCo college course on early childhood psychology. I know almost nothing about psych so I was curious when I saw them at the library. What went wrong on this one was that the lecturer had 0 vocal variety. And he spoke very, very slowly. I mean that… I grew… impatient because I knew… exactly what he was… going to say… next but it… took a long… time to… get out. The pauses didn’t really seem to fit with the clauses. I will give the guy credit because he tried to make very dry material accessible through examples, bringing it down to Earth and not filling it with mumbo jumbo. But unfortunately inherently dry material (to me at least) mixed with dry presentation I couldn’t take.

 

My next book on tape was about the rebuilding of Japan after World War II, Embracing Defeat. This one wasn’t read by the college professor but by a professional voice actor and his delivery was good. Unfortunately Embracing Defeat itself wasn’t so good for a casual reader like me.

 

The first fourth or so of the book was about societal changes in Japan after WWII. Like the black market, how academics on the left responded, pop culture changes, the conservative reactionaries, and so on. It’s inherently interesting, but it felt like long strands of facts thrown out without really a narrative thrust. Usually these books - at least aimed at popular audiences and not pure academics - will identify a few key players up front and let us get to know them. Not so in Embracing Defeat. A lot of the information was arranged around topic, not chronology, and I never really got to know any of the Japanese living through this.

 

I was about to abandon it when it got to the part about Douglas MacArthur and the politics of the occupation. Finally, I thought, the story would start to move. But not so. It still just felt like a bunch of facts, interesting admittedly, but it was never clear where it was going. I couldn’t really pick out a chronological order here. It’s a shame because it was well written and amazingly researched, but I had to give it up.

 

Presently I’m listening to The Making of the Atomic Bomb. Wow! It’s epic, 24 tapes. I usually don’t go that long, but it’s been a long time since I’ve dove into physics and I saw that the book won the Pulitzer. Perfect balance between background on the scientists - including their quirks - and broader historical scene, along with an accessible info on nuclear physics. I’m a fourth of the way through and Hitler is only now taking power, to give an indication on how much background is provided. The narrator is quite good and obviously there’s the strong narrative pulse of the scientists’ adventures and eventually how they came together for the Bomb.

 

Moral is easy - vocal variety matters and tell a story, don’t throw facts out.