First of all, don’t tell jokes.

Here’s why.

Jokes are stale and overused. When you tell a joke, there is a 87.3% chance that one of your audience have heard it.

In fact, one time when I attended the Division Humorous Contest at Sri Lanka, two of the contestants told the same joke! It was embarassing for both the second speaker and the audience. Can you imagine if the third speaker tell the same joke?

To make sure that this won’t happen to you and to ensure a higher percentage chance that your audience will laugh, Doug Stevenson, a guru in storytelling advised speakers to tell an imbroglio story.

An imbroglio story is one where you relate to your audience an embarassing situation that happened to you. At that time, it may be a tragedy. But when you tell the story in the present time, it is funny.

Because, believe it or not, humor is about tragedy and the laughter relieves the pent up tension built by the story. As you might have guess, part of that tension comes from the fact that this could have happen to you.

Let me give you an example.

If you have ever attended your friend’s housewarming, you will know how normal it is to have them all excited and enthusiastic. They will show you the entire place with a lot of pride.

I did the exact same thing when I first had my apartment in United States, shared with my Italian room mate.

So one time, I was showing a friend of mine the apartment. And I left the best for the last - the bathroom! It was huge and we had this really luxurious bathtub which I wanted to show off.

I held on to the door knob and I went “And this is the best part of my apartment… TADA!”

Opened the door and guess what….

My room mate was in there.

Showering.

You should see the expression on my friend’s face.

Both of them.

Well although it wasn’t ME caught with pants down (thankfully), it was still a very embarassing moment, for all of us. And this story never fail to make people laugh. I am sure you are laughing right now.

Notice how personal this story is and only I can tell the story.

Even if you do not find it funny, this story can still serve a purpose - to make a point. For example - what do you do when you get caught with your pants down (figuratively), say in office. And you can use this story to open your speech.

See, if you were to pay attention to your life, there are actually a lot of these embarassing moments that you can milk.

Who needs jokes when you are the butt of the joke?

So here’s what you do, start paying attention to the embarassing things that happen to you, or even to your friends around you.

Write them down because you never know when you can use them.

Cheers,
Eric Feng
Your Public Speaking Coach

P.S: Till today, my friend refuse to admit that the bathtub wasn’t the only thing she saw. What a liar.

P.P.S: If you are looking to build humor confidence, you got to check out the Humor College Program.

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