By Peter Jeff
The Leadership Mints Guy

Here’s an idea to help spice your public speaking with humor. Reading time: 7:28

SEASON your next meeting with humor. SEASON is an acrostic for 6 ways to sprinkle your prepared remarks with a comic’s flair.

S for Substituting

When you substitute, you bait and switch.

You bait your audience with a straight line (the setup) then exchange it unexpectedly with another related concept -(the punchline) .

• Jay Leno, commenting on the nomination of John Kerry as Secretary of State says that John Kerry’s face “is longer than mine. He looks more like Secretariat of State.”

• Citing the wedding night of 86-year-old Hugh Hefner to a 26-year-old Leno says: “She wore Channel No. 5. He wore Fabreze.”

• And in the movie Duck Soup, in an era long before I-tunes and IPods, Groucho Marx says: “You haven’t stopped talking since I got here. You must have been vaccinated with a phonograph needle.”

E for Exaggerating

When you exaggerate, you stretch a point of view.

• Observing the longevity of Regis Philbin still hosting a TV talk show at 80, David Letterman exaggerated: “I don’t want to say that Regis is old but his first co-host was Eve.”

• Reacting to wintry weather in New York City, Letterman said: ” It was so cold today driving to work (in New York City), the navigation lady in my car directed me to Saudi Arabia.

• Mark Russell observed that “A trillion is a number so high that if you stood on the payment book you’d experience weightlessness.”

• And comedian Rodney Dangerfield noted: “The plumbing in my apartment is so bad that if I want to take a bath on Sunday I have to start running the water on Wednesday.”

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