10 Commandments of Humor Part 1

Stainton's 10 Commandments of Humor (Part 1)
Bill Stainton

1. Thou shalt target thy audience
This is the first and great commandment! You must know who your audience is, and choose your humor appropriately. This doesn’t mean just knowing who the group is, or even who the individuals who comprise the audience are. It means understanding the occasion, knowing the back-story of the group, assessing the dynamics of the event. I was speaking to a group whose venerable and much beloved founder had just passed away the week before. Now, I don’t do a lot of death related material, but you can bet I went over my entire presentation with a fine-toothed comb just to make sure there was nothing that might offend this audience, given the situation. I also made sure to work my way into the humor a bit more gently than I normally would. The point is that without this information, I could have gotten myself into a deep, deep hole!

It's also important to know your audience so that you can gear your material specifically towards them. For example, one of the workshops I offer is called How the Pros Write Comedy. I've delivered this workshop to many groups, and while the basic information stays the same, my approach - as well as the examples I'll use - will vary depending on whether I'm speaking to, say, a group of television writers or the editors of a religious newsletter (which, incidentally, turned out to be one of the best and most creative groups I've worked with!). The key to remember is that every audience is different; therefore, to one degree or another, every presentation you give should be different as well!

2. Thou shalt use thy humor to make a point
There was a time when I thought everybody knew this, but I continue to see speakers telling jokes whose connection to their message is peripheral at best. Now, I’m not saying you can’t throw the occasional one-liner or ad-lib in for a quick laugh. But if you’re going to launch into a story of any length, you’d better not be doing it just to get a chuckle! If you are doing this, you are committing 2 egregious platform sins.

First, you’re setting yourself up to bomb! Think about it: if there’s an element of your presentation that exists solely to get a laugh, what happens if it doesn’t get that laugh? You bomb! You know you’ve bombed, the audience knows you’ve bombed, and because the only point of the story was to get a laugh, you’ve got nowhere else to go. That’s not a good feeling. If, on the other hand, that same story is designed to exemplify one of the points of your presentation, it no longer matters if it gets a laugh!!! Sure, it’s nice, but the story no longer depends on it.

The second egregious platform sin of using a lengthy story just to get a laugh is that you’re wasting your audience’s time! Unless you were hired strictly to entertain, the audience is expecting to get useful information from your presentation. They’re investing their time, and they expect a return on that investment. When you use humor to make a point, you are providing both good entertainment and a good return on your audience's investment.