Speakers’ Corner - The Prime Performers Blog

Some people believe that humour has no place in public life, but nothing could be further from the truth. Spicing up a serious topic with a well-timed anecdote will keep your audience riveted as opposed to asleep. Any expert can stand up and deliver the cold hard facts, but a great public speaker keeps everyone actually interested in said facts. Good communication skills are vital for any business executive and humour plays an important part in effective communication.

There are many benefits to using humour to get your point across, but here are a few specific ones.

• You’ll quickly gain and keep people’s attention.
• Using humour in your speech makes you more likeable. You’ll be able to connect with the audience in a very real way.
• It gets your point across without creating hostility. This is especially important if you are presenting new ideas and policies that may not go over well with some individuals.
• Using humour shows that you don’t take yourself too seriously. This can also help overcome overly flattering introductions. No one likes to sit and listen to a snob who obviously thinks too highly of himself.
• Humour easily lightens up heavy material and makes the information you do relate much more memorable.
• It is almost guaranteed that if you will make a very positive impression and even be asked back.
• Humour helps to paint a picture in people’s minds. A well-constructed illustration can often explain a point more clearly than mere words.
• Perhaps the best benefit of all is that your audience will leave happy. You’ll have got your point across and they’ll have a good laugh. Everyone wins!

Even if you think that you are simply not a “funny” person, that doesn’t mean that you can’t use humour to illustrate a point. If you’re not good at telling jokes, then try some self-deprecating humour or simply use a witty one-liner to grab everyone’s attention right off the bat. The key is to find what works for you. The last thing a public speaker wants to be is forgettable. You naturally want your audience to hang on your words and remember what you had to say long after you’re gone. People remember a good laugh. A point made with humour will linger in their minds and you will have effectively done your job.

To most of us - thankfully unburdened by medical conditions such as MS - speech seems as easy and as natural as breathing. We think something and then say it. Sometimes, we even speak before thinking with hilarious/disastrous consequences. But the actual physical act of speaking itself is surprisingly complicated - involving several muscles, body parts and mechanisms.

Thoughts into Speech

Behind the act of speech lies thought. This is still poorly understood, but involves the firing of electrical signals between the millions of synapses within the brain to form patterns and connections that somehow comprise “thought.” With near simultaneity, the brain also fires signals to the parts of the body concerned with speaking and delivers instructions to convert these into speech. This includes all the varieties of tone, pitch and emphasis that might be included in whatever you’re saying.

That all this happens subconsciously practically in time with the action of thought itself is something of a minor miracle. The next time you leave an argument and only then think of the ultimate riposte, go easy on yourself: after all, you’ve turned millions of minute electrical signals into comprehensible sound without giving it a second thought. In many ways, it’s the neatest trick in all of human evolution and without it we’d probably still be living in the trees, cowering from the monkeys.

Like all sound, speech depends on ‘waves’ delivered through a ‘medium’. Or, if you prefer, disturbances in the air (speech underwater being mainly limited to “help!”). Vibrations in the air are decoded by your ears to make them into recognisable sounds. Another amazing feat, when you consider it.

The signals sent by your brain cause your mouth to open, your tongue to move, your lungs to inhale/exhale and your vocal chords to shorten or lengthen with amazing synchronicity and ultimately verbalise your thoughts. The action of all these elements with the air in your mouth causes the molecules in the air to vibrate. These vibrations are carried outward in the form of waves, which are then received as ’sound’ by the ear of the lucky recipient.

The lungs - push air up the larynx as the diaphragm (itself a large muscle that sits below the lungs) is contracted

The larynx - comprises two thin membranes which are contracted or relaxed by various muscles. This creates a vibration in the air that actually forms the basis of the sound of speech. The tighter these are contracted, the higher the frequency with which they vibrate and therefore the higher the pitch of our speech

The throat, mouth and nasal cavity - adjust the ‘tone’ of the sound through changing shapes

The lips, tongue and jaw - create the various sounds of vowels and consonants that actually articulate the words

Enoch Powell: “Rivers of Blood”

Arguably one of the most forcefully intellectual British politicians of the post-war era, Enoch Powell condemned himself to the margins of political life with this speech, which was given in near-obscurity to an audience in Birmingham in 1964 but has never been far from the public consciousness ever since. Britain was dealing with the realities of the first wave of immigration from the Commonwealth when he chose to quote a constituent that “one day the black man would have the whip hand over the white man” and from another that she was followed everywhere by “grinning piacannines”. To these thoughts, he added his own, more learned take: like the Roman Sybil from the Aenid he looked to the future and saw the rivers “foaming with much blood”. This inflammatory mix of words led to his expulsion from the Tory party and 4 decades in the wilderness where he was simultaneously reviled as a racist demagogue and hailed as a visionary prophet. Although his speech continues to be a touchstone for race-relations in the UK, it ended Powell’s stint as a serious politician at the centre of the debate and his voice was rarely heard in public again.

George Bush: “Mission Accomplished”

In 2003, the defeat of the bulk of the Iraqi regular army was a foregone conclusion. The might and technology of the US Army had seen off the overwhelmed Iraqi troops, deposing Saddam Hussein’s regieme far more easily than many commentators had predicted. All of this prompted President George W. Bush to give a valedictory speech from the deck of the US Aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln. Such speeches are common to all politicians in the afterglow of military victor, but this particular speech caused Bush much regret in later years. The content of the speech - which actually still counselled caution in proclaiming victory - was largely overshadowed by its theatrical presentation and a banner in the background which read “mission accomplished.” Despite the fact that this phrase never occurred in the speech itself, it became a byword for the administration’s hubris as the war continued to grind on for several years to come.

Iain Duncan-Smith: “The quiet man is turning up the volume”

A decent, if somewhat earnest and upright character, Iain Duncan-Smith was the surprise choice of the Conservative party to be its leader in 2002. Lacking the presence, pizazz and media savvy of his counterpart in number 10, he was forced to endure a whispering campaign against him that began almost as soon as he was elected leader. His woes weren’t helped by the fact that his public speaking was often marked by a noticeable frog in his throat giving his oratory a halting and seemingly reluctant tone. Facing the Conservative Party conference for the first time he claimed that he was “turning up the volume.” The mismatch between the public’s perception of him and what he claimed to represent was too much for the Tory party who swiftly toppled him soon afterwards.

Neville Chamberlain: “Peace in our Lifetime”

Chamberlain has been painted as little more than a craven appeaser of Hitler by history. The apogee of his hubris came when he claimed to have secured European peace in a deal with Hitler at Munich. Hitler’s biography was already by this time brimful of treachery and peppered with slaughter, yet Chamberlain claimed to have looked into his eyes and seen “a man of his word” with whom he could do business, and so put his name to a deal with the Nazi leader that was worth about as much as the paper on which it was written. On his death, Churchill was magnaminous in reminding the nation that Chamberlain had been driven solely by the love of peace and the pursuit of peace above all else. Nontheless his name, and that of Munich, have become bywords for defeatism.

Neil Kinnock: “Well alright! Well alright!”

In 1992 you couldn’t find a political analyst in the land who would put money on a Conservative victory in the general election that year. John Major’s government held the slenderest of majorities and were beset by internal divisions and public contempt caused by a deep economic recession. All Labour had to do was to maintain an aura of seriousness and they would stroll into number 10. Leader Neil Kinnock, however, completely misjudged the public mood with his 1992 election campaign speech. The triumphalism and glitzy showbusiness nature of the setting, with its laser-show and helicopter arrival were matched only by Kinnock’s absurd (and thrice-repeated) declamation that “well alright!” The public, put off by the showmanship, disagreed, Major was returned to power and Kinnock had to take to Europe to find a big enough stage for his rhetoric.

The 20th Century saw upheavals and social unrest from its start to its close and political leaders have, for good or ill, dealt with these crises as best they can. Often, while people fail to recall the deeds and the circumstances of these crises, the words uttered at the time continue to resound down the ages. This is the gift of oratory, and its best it can make concrete an emotional moment and solidify a response to a time when leadership is most needed. Words are not actions, but it is true that words can outlive the actions they inspired.

Martin Luther King: “I Have a Dream”

That the world has so readily accepted Barack Obama’s accession to the presidency of the United States is astonishing when you consider that within living memory African-Americans were forced to sit on the backs of buses or eat in ‘black only’ restaurants. How did change come so fast and so far? It was at least partly down the work of one man – Martin Luther King Jr, who spoke out with amazing courage at a time when his people were oppressed and ridiculed. His moral force and clarity of his vision were nowhere more obvious than in his famous ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, made in 1963 at the Lincoln memorial in Washington.

Within 5 years, King was dead – murdered by a racist gunman – but his legacy lives on today, and this is one of the watershed speeches of the American 20^th Century

Winston Churchill: “We Shall Fight Them on the Beaches”

In Churchill, Hitler not only met his military match, but also a supreme orator who – like the Nazi dictator – knew exactly which buttons to press to rouse national fervour. At a time when his country faced defeat of arms for the first time in centuries, he corralled and solidified his compatriots through resounding speech. Like many of Churchill’s speeches the delivery might sound odd to modern ears, frequently falling in pitch at the end of sentences giving his words a sombre, almost downbeat feeling. Despite that, in terms of imagery and power, this is Churchill at his evocative best. Calls to history are commonplace in political parlance, but his comparison of the RAF pilots to the Crusaders (horribly un-PC in this day and age!) and his call upon a thousand years of history cannot fail but to stir the breast.

John F. Kennedy: “Ich Bin Ein Berliner”

The sixties were a time of tumultuous change and the very appearance and background of John F. Kennedy, allied to his violent and public death seemed to chime deeply with the times. Faced with crises in both Cuba and the Soviet Bloc, JFK showed that he had a rhetorical touch equal in every way to the stature and importance of the times. In declaring himself to be a Berliner in this famous piece of oratory, he placed himself on the side of freedom over oppression using memorable imagery and the common political trick of appealing to the judgement of history.

Franklin Roosevelt: “A date which will live in infamy”

Roosevelt was another towering figure America’s recent past, and it fell to him to deal with one of the supreme crises of that nation’s history when the US Navy at Pearl Harbour fell victim to a surprise attack by the Japanese navy. This, the briefest of speeches and surprisingly factual, is determinedly short of the kind of soaring oratory practised by Churchill. In its character it rather reflects the unsparing nature of the conflict to come, in which no quarter was given or taken and which would end in the conflagration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 4 short years later. Despite that, the words and intent are resounding and clear and echo down the years as a clarion-call to America’s determination to stand on its principles.

The Duke of Windsor: Abdication Speech

Whilst the monarchy may be little more than a political sideshow and tourist attraction these days it still has the capacity to connect with the people like few other institutions. Amongst the many scandals that have hit the monarchy over the last century, few are as poignant as that which befell Edward VIII, who was forced to give up his crown in order to pursue his love of an American divorcee, Wallis Simpson. Unlike the other speeches in this list, its impact on the world was minimal and its content more personal. However, in its simply expressed dignity and public declaration of love, it remains touching and powerful even today.