When your jokes bombed…
Audience love speakers who are funny, more so when they made fun of themselves. However sometimes the jokes that the speaker unleash bombed i.e. no one laughs. And worse, you get their blank stare “HUH??!!” What should the speaker do?
Lament and blame the audience explicity?
Repeat the joke, this time more slowly?
Explain the punchline?
Not pretty.
There are two ways to approach this. The first approach is to follow up with a saver line that is both witty and mildly attacking to force them to laugh. However for this to work, the speaker has to be very confident and experienced. When your joke bombed, follow up with these lines…
- Do any of you out there speak English?
- I’ve got a book for sale outside that explains these jokes. You may want to pick up a copy.
- (If one person is laughing) Will you be kind enough to run around the room so it looks like everyone is having fun?
- You have marvelous self-control.
- I’ve got 20 more bad jokes just like that one and no one gets out until you start laughing.
- [Pick out a well-known person in the crowd] Joe that’s the last time I’m using one of your jokes.
- I know you’re out there, I can hear you breathing.
- I’m not going to wait forever for you.
- I was waiting on you a little on that one.
- That was a Polaroid joke. It takes one minute to get it.9
- Everyone doesn’t have to be funny all the time and I just proved it.
There is a second approach to this. One that I would recommend if you are still building your experience at being funny. Simply move on. Yes, don’t repeat the joke or even try explaining the punchline. It would only make you look bad and the audience will feel extremely uncomfortable. By moving on, you will save yourself any embarrassment and your audience may not even know that you were trying to make them laugh!
Having said that, I would recommend you NOT to tell a joke for the sake of telling one, unless you have a message that you want to deliver. This will make your speech more compact and effective. Let’s say you want to tell a joke to underscore a point. If you fail to tickle their funny bone, it is ok since you still have a point. But if they do laugh, that’s a bonus!
So keep that in mind, the next time you unleash a joke to your unaware audience and it bombs, no worries. It is not the end of the world (yet)…
(Saver lines were provided by Tom Antion)
[…] 2. When your jokes bombed We all have our experiences of jokes bombing. See how you can avoid the embarrassment when no one laughs at your “lame” jokes… […]
I absolutely agree, that using saver lines is appropriate. Using stock lines like this could be effective in the beginning, but I think nothing beats coming up with a spontaneous comment in the moment.
Lines like: “Do any of you out there speak English?”, “I know you’re out there, I can hear you breathing” and “I’ve got a book for sale outside that explains these jokes. You may want to pick up a copy”, are somewhat cliched and could be construed as attacking an audience.
Attacking an audience for our failing joke. I think that can be quite dangerous ground, don’t you think?
Perhaps enrolling in a improv class or participating in table topics to practise thinking on ones feet like you suggest…?