After Dinner Speaking Lecture on Humor

A six to eight minute, carefully planned speech with an introduction,
(catches attention, gives a thesis that makes a serious point, and previews points)
and body that uses at least three comic devices and ends with a conclusion.

Nature of Humor
I. Benefits of Humor
A. Method for establishing
group identification.

The inside joke promotes group unity, proving that you are a member of a collective.

Humor signals your group membership.

“Do you get it?”

B. Humor is therapeutic.

The word meaning comes from the idea of good health.
By releasing stress it benefits that body.
“Laughter is good medicine.”

C. Humor can disarm an opponent or hostile audience.

II. Two Basic Types of Humor

A. Humor that violates our expectation

of the world or language.

(There are four of these comic devices.)

1. Exaggeration

a. Overstatement — something is far more or larger than it actually is.

“Fat Albert was so fat that when he laid down in the sand at the ocean,
he was mistaken as beached whale.”

b. Understatement — something is far less than it actually is.

“Bobby Bones was so skinny that strangers often swatted at him thinking that he
was a spider web in their path.”

Monty Python’s Black Knight. “Its only a flesh wound.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKhEw7nD9C4

2. Word Plays or Puns.

Puns or word plays violate our expectation of how language is usually processed.

These jokes play with language.

Puns force together two terms associated only by their sound patterns.

“Isn’t that punny.”

Sign at old fashioned grocery store: “No long waits. No short weights.”

“Horses may get into the movies,
but they’re usually saddled with the bit parts.”

Silly puns:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTSXWp18ej0

3. Anti-climax

This type of joke has a surprise ending that violates how we expect a story
will normally end.

It is usually a story with an unexpected, let down or surprise ending, sometimes
called a “shaggy dog” story.

Any story that has an unexpected ending.

Westours story

A Dog Named Mace

There was once a handyman who had a dog named Mace. Mace was a
great dog except he had one weird habit: he liked to eat grass – not just a
little bit, but in quantities that would make a lawnmower blush. And nothing,
it seemed, could cure him of it.
One day, the handyman lost his expensive diamond studded silver wrench
in the tall grass while he was working outside.
He looked and looked, but it was nowhere to be found. As it was getting dark,
he gave up for the night and decided to look for it in the morning.
When he awoke, he went outside, and saw that his dog had eaten the grass all in the area,
around where he had been working, and his wrench now lay in plain sight, glinting in the sun.
Going out to get his wrench, he called the dog over to him and said,

“A grazing Mace, how sweet the hound, that saved a wrench for me.”

4. The Absurd.
Stupid, crazy, unthinkable comparisons or situations.