Robert Ausura Writing

     "This guy walks into a bar..."

     Most speeches (short of declarations of war and resignations from public office) rely on moments of humor to break the ice and refresh the audience's attention from time to time, and jokes are a ready source of momentary humor. They circulate freely by the thousands. Fresh ones appear daily. And there's one to fit every audience, every situation, and every taste (or lack of it).

     Jokes are the shareware of comedy.

     Unfortunately I forget a joke almost as soon as I've stopped laughing at it. For a while I tried immediately writing down the funniest ones I heard, but I excused myself from so many conversations to go off to a corner and scribble that people started asking if I had a bladder condition. And if it was contagious. So I've resigned myself to laughing and forgetting and having a joke file that is as empty as a campaign promise.

     Still, most of my clients expect funny moments in their speeches. So I have had to learn to write funny without relying on jokes. In effect I have had to learn to program my own humor instead of using the available shareware. This has led me to think a lot about what's funny—not an unpleasant pastime. Fifteen years ago I even attended a comedy writing workshop taught by Danny Simon, playwright Neil Simon's younger brother, who wrote for The Mary Tyler Moore Show and other TV hits of its era, and who told jokes badly but managed to write funny anyway.

     I've learned that the formula for humor is simple and easy to apply, and that the best humor often is custom-made.

     Humor is the result of 1) surprising the audience by 2) suddenly showing them something familiar in 3) an unexpectedly amusing light. A joke starts with a familiar situation ("A priest, a minister and a rabbi are playing golf...") and with a sudden twist (the punch line) surprises us with an amusing perspective. Sitcoms, feature-length comedies, and comic plays do the same thing, but they have to sustain their humor by repeatedly surprising us. No small feat.

     Speeches too have to sustain their humor. There are two ways to do this:

by using a series of disparate jokes whose only similarity is that they are funny, or
by developing a thread of humor based on the topic or the situation of the speech.

     I prefer the latter.

     One of my favorite projects was a convention speech for the president of an association whose members were facing tough economic times. The convention was in 1992, the 500th anniversary of Columbus' coming to America. The venue was a hotel overlooking San Diego harbor, lined with yachts awaiting the America's Cup competition. The message of the speech: our association provides the leadership we need to get through these uncertain times.

     Lots of opportunity for inspiration. Lots of opportunity for humor, too.

     A nautical theme was the natural choice. I recalled the beauty of the yachts in the harbor, then segued to the familiar image of Christopher Columbus, sailor and explorer. Then I surprised the audience with a portrait of Columbus the businessman: begging venture capital in the middle of an economic crisis, basing a voyage on grossly erroneous calculations, losing a third of his assets (the Santa Maria) in a shipwreck on Christmas Day.

     There is nothing inherently funny about these facts—that's another thing about humor, the best is often a fine line away from tragedy—but by presenting them tongue-in-cheek, I got the audience laughing at misfortunes which, not incidentally, were a lot like their own. Then I dropped the inspirational boom: Despite his errors and the odds against him, Columbus succeeded through persistence, faith and the teamwork of his crew. So will the winners of the America's Cup. So too will the members of the association.

     Lots of people liked that speech, partly because they laughed, partly because of what they laughed at. They might have laughed just as hard at a guy in a bar with a frog on his head. But somehow it just wouldn't have been the same.