funny presentation ideas

funny presentation ideas

Funny Presentation Ideas

1. Incorporating Humor in Presentations

Use current events to relate the material to real life, or use familiar quotes and modify them to your own meaning to bring a smile to your audience. Put some thought into the presentation title; it might reflect a humorous theme throughout the material. Presenters must remember to maintain professionalism with the humor. It is unacceptable to make fun of an individual or group of people, to use off-color humor, or to exploit gender, racial or ethnic stereotypes. Finally, a presenter can solicit a friend to sit in the audience and give a thumbs up or down every time he sneaks in a corny humor-related attempt. If the friend has a cell phone, he can text a score on a 1-10 scale to each attempt and keep a running average for the presentation. A simple numerical gauge of the audience’s entertainment level can keep a presenter on track.

The world’s hardest job is updating a PowerPoint presentation. Where’s the humor? How many times have we seen the generic slides with boring animated graphics or cheesy clip art? Where are the laughs? Presenters are doing a disservice to their audience when they bore them to tears. There are no excuses. Every presenter can add humor to their presentation. It’s easy! Start with an anecdote about how this is the third time you’ve presented this due to technical difficulties, or how you had to fight the budget office to get these numbers. Team presentations can employ gentle teasing and playful banter between presenters. Be careful not to turn this into a comedy routine, the goal is to keep the presentation light and advantageous to the material. A well-timed open-ended rhetorical question can set up a good laugh. A simple statement such as “Let me repeat that, just to confuse you” can relax the audience and ease the tension everyone gets while trying to comprehend ambiguous material. Remember to keep it relevant to the content.

2. Engaging Visuals and Multimedia

This medium, as mentioned, is most vital in modern times and age. Due to the sheer volume of information we are presented with on a constant basis, there is so much that can be lost on an audience if it is presented in a purely verbal form. The capacity of the human memory is truly vast, but it is complex and intricate, and varies from person to person. Generally, it is easier for people to remember information and ideas if they are associated with a visual cue. A well-thought-out image can convey far more complex ideas than just its face value. And information stored visually can be recalled far later on in a more accurate form than information which is stored purely verbally. Think of a color which has been named for you once, you will remember it with no problem. Compare this with a verbal explanation of the same color, chances are you may not have retained the full conception of that color in your mind. The optimal tool for visual information in a presentation is the SmartArt graphic. This tool is highly efficient at packaging information in a way that is easy to comprehend. With the array of diagram layout types it can display relations through an assortment of means. This tool is most useful in an explanation or analysis of a sequence of events. For example, creating a Gantt chart SmartArt graphic to illustrate the timeline of a project. It also circumvents the minor annoyance of a PowerPoint animation of creating the same diagram piece by piece. High volumes of information can sometimes be best displayed as a literal picture of an idea. High-resolution screenshots can be taken and inserted into a presentation file. They say a picture is worth a thousand words. This idea can be put to good effect when an idea is explained with an example. This can be especially true of technical or complex information where a theoretical idea is better conveyed with proof of concept. For example, an existing software application, electrical circuit diagram, etc.

3. Interactive Activities for Audience Participation

Get them onstage This is a tried and true method that can work well with almost any kind of presentation. Have a few volunteers come up to the front to participate in a small role-play, answer questions, give testimonials, a song and dance, whatever is relevant to your topic. The goal is just to get them in front of the audience, involved in your topic, and everyone is watching what’s going on. This is a good method in that it can add some humor to the presentation, but you need to make sure that the participants aren’t going to be too embarrassed or uncomfortable with what you’re asking them to do. A spin-off of this method, obviously, is to get the entire audience up on their feet and participating in hands-on activities, another very effective way to get your point across by showing how it works in practice, but this method depends on the size of your audience and how open they are to your ideas. By forcing people to do something that they’re not comfortable with, you are running the risk of putting them off your presentation altogether.

Your audience knows when you’re putting in an effort to include them in your presentation, and the methods you use to engage with them will greatly influence how interactive the presentation is. The two main kinds of activities you can use are interactive and group activities, but for now, we’ll just outline some methods that you can use to get your audience personally involved in your presentation.

4. Storytelling Techniques for a Funny Narrative

– Use of timing: Placing the most mundane event in a situation with impeccable comedic timing will make it ten times funnier. Consider placing your tragic coffee incident in the previous example in a library during a silent study session. This is because…

– Overreaction: If something is humorous when it occurs in daily life, it will be twice as funny at double the magnitude. If you’ve had a coffee cup slip out of your hand and spill before, imagine if it were to somehow explode, covering both you and the room in hot coffee.

– Slight embellishment: This is a dangerous path we tread, for to embellish a tale too much will render it false, and the humor lost. However, often the truth of an event is funny enough to stand, but needs a little push. Try to use descriptive language and slight fabrication to paint your story in the best light. Remember to always stay true to the essence of the event.

While hard and fast rules generally inhibit the creative process, there still exist narrative arcs and nuances that can shift a story from mildly amusing to one of side-splitting hilarity. How often have we all endeavored to recount something amusing that happened to us, only to have it fall flat when we were met with blank stares or disinterested nods? What separates us from the professional writer or comedian is simply knowledge of what makes a funny story work. Here are a few guidelines:

5. Tips for Effective Delivery and Timing

It is very important to structure your talk. Use signpost language at the beginning e.g. “I will begin by discussing…move on to…then finally” and summarize what you have said at the end. This will help your audience to follow your argument. This technique is also very beneficial when preparing for questions at the end of your talk. Having a clear structure will make it more likely that your audience ask pertinent questions, as they will have been able to identify which are the key points in your talk. This means you can allocate your time effectively and not be caught out with 2 minutes to go having only discussed half of your material.

Use your audience analysis information to inform decisions about how to tailor the presentation to their needs and interests. If they have the same expertise as you, they will probably be interested in the detail of your research. If they are not familiar with your subject area, they will need a broader overview. This will help to set the depth and breadth of your presentation… how much material you cover and how much detail you go into on specific points. It’s easy to alienate an audience by delivering either too much or too little information. A clear understanding of your audience will help you to avoid these problems.

Tips for effective delivery and timing. Remember a good presentation is not just about the content. You’ve put all your effort into the preparation of your slides and ensuring the data and information are presented as clearly as possible. You should also take care to ensure that you present the material in a context that your audience can make the most sense of it.