Tag Archives: The Odd Couple

SEASON Your Staff Meetings With Humor

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By Peter Jeff
The Leadership Mints Guy

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

Jay Leno

Jay Leno

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.

David Letterman

David Letterman

  • 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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Sharpening Your Vulnerabilty on Elephant Tusks

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By Peter Jeff
The Leadership Mints Guy

Here’s an idea to enhance your sense of interdependence. Reading time: 2:10.

You just got that big job, that promotion, that major account. And now you are feeling on top of the world. Invincible. You are the King or Queen of the corporate jungle. Hear ME roar!

Hear ME roar! Like an elephant: the largest living land animal on earth with no natural predator.

Hear ME roar! Like an elephant- a 10 to 12-ton weapon used in war during the Roman Empire.

Hear ME roar! Like an elephant wielding a trunk with more than 50,000 muscles that can suck up to 15 quarts of water at a time.

So huge. So strong. So unconquerable. And yet so vulnerable.

So vulnerable that an elephant’s skin is very sensitive to insects in key spots like behind the ears. So vulnerable that the elephant’s best friend in the jungle is the egret — a small bird that rides on the back of an elephant eating flies and other insects that “bug” the elephant’s sensitive ears.

The elephant and an egret are reputed to be Mother Nature’s Odd couple. They feed off each others’ vulnerabilities that counter-intuitively makes both stronger.

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