If using humor in your professional speaking presentation, understand this. People will pay more to be entertained than they will to be informed. Look around you and you will see that the top industry is the entertainment industry. Encompassing sports events, comic acts, movies, television and music, the entertainment industry steadily received trillions of dollars worldwide.
Humor accomplishes many things in your presentation.
Here are some things that humor can do for you!
1. Humor helps you connect with your audience. Make yourself relate and connect with your audience as they begin to see that it’s not all about the information. Humor draws your audience to you because people are naturally drawn to positive things.
2. Humor makes you more approachable and likable as a speaker. Your audience will see you as being more down to earth and again, they can relate with you.
3. Humor creates interest in your topic as well as yourself. Humor just makes things interesting to follow. People like to laugh.
4. Humor helps to keep the attention of your audience. Your audience tunes out because they get lost in your presentation. By using humor, it’ll be harder for your audience to tune out because they will want to hear your humorous story.
5. Humor strengthens point and ideas you want to highlight in your presentation. Funny stories are memorable and can strengthen the point of your message. Television sitcoms are famous for taking real life situations and presenting them in a humorous fashion.
6. Humor removes hostility in your presentation. If there were any ill feelings towards you or your message, humor lightens the mood of your audiences and disarms negative emotions.
7. Humor helps connects pieces of information in your topic. Work humor into the transition points of your presentation. In that way they will be the bridge that connects the points of your message together.
8. Humor helps paint mental images in the minds of your audience. Self-effacing humor is often related back to your audience because they can see themselves in those same situations.
9. Humor makes your presentation more memorable. People remember when they laugh. They’ll remember funny stories or funny instance during your presentation.
10. Humor lightens a heavy topic. People can only take so much of heavy topics. You don’t want to make your audience feel depressed even if your topic discusses a very grave matter.
11. Humor can bring in better evaluations and more product sales. Humor warms your audience up to you. In doing so, your audience will be more open to purchasing your back of the room products as well as give you a better review.
12. Humor will make people happy. People want to enjoy your seminar. They want to have a good time and they want to be happy. Humor helps you achieve that.
Humor can add so much variety to an otherwise dull, information only presentation. Helping to connect you with your audience, humor is a great addition that can bring you better speaker reviews and increased revenue. Add some spice to your message by incorporating humor!