Last Monday was week five of my stand up comedy course (read about week 1, 3 and 4). For the first time I used a microphone during my set. I’ll be honest, using a microphone is fairly trivial. Just point it towards your mouth and speak. But my instructor, Joe Charles, explained a few finer points to help make your set run smoothly.

Find out what is available

Is there an amplification system available? Will there be a sound technician? If you’re performing at a comedy club or an open mic then of course one will be provided. But what about if you’re doing a one off gig at a pub or a corporate event? The location may not be set up for performers and the organisers may be expecting you to bring your own microphone and amplification.

Joe Charles told us about turning up at an event with no amplification and having to rely on voice projection, while his hand kept creeping up to his chest to hold a phantom microphone. He said you only make this mistake once in your career, after suffering the embarrassment once you always check what is available beforehand.

Holding on

There is no right or wrong way to hold a microphone. Some comedians rest it on their chin, others hold it below their chests requiring the volume to be cranked all the way up. You’re going to have to develop your own technique to match your unique style. Here are three things to bare in mind:

1. Keep the microphone a fixed distance away from your mouth. This will give your voice a consistent volume. Once you have mastered this you can explore the effect of varying the distance to incorporate vocal variety like whispering and shouting.

2. Microphones are directional. Point it towards your mouth so you’re talking into the top of it, rather than the side.

3. Don’t obscure your face too much. You want the audience to make out your expressions, and you don’t want to look like this:

Dealing with a bad setup

The biggest skill when using a microphone is adapting to unpredictable situations caused by a poor quality or faulty PA system.

If the connector is loose then hold the microphone at the bottom so that it doesn’t fall out.

If you can’t hear yourself when you speak first check that the microphone is turned on. If it’s on the problem might be due to the positioning of the speakers (i.e. the audience can hear you fine but there are no speakers pointing at the stage), or it might be due to a technical fault. Ask the audience if they can here you. Be assertive when you ask, the audience may be feel uncomfortable answering or they may not be able to hear you.

Be prepared for when things go wrong. Eventually you’re going to have problems with the wire falling out of the mic, or something breaking. Stay relaxed and have a joke prepared for these situations.

The mic stand

Be purposeful. Decide in advance if you will use the mic stand or not.

If you decide to leave the microphone in the stand adjust it to the right height. Put your foot on the base of the mic stand to keep it steady while your doing this.

If you decide not to use it then 1. Remove the mic from the stand by gently pulling and twisting so it doesn’t pop out and hit you in the face 2. Untangle the cable 3. Move the microphone stand to to the back of the stage, otherwise it will just get in the way.

Be aware of the wire

If you’ve got a wired microphone then watch out for the wire when your moving across the stage. If you tread on it while your moving you risk pulling the connector out of the mic. Use your other hand to flick it out of your path, but be aware of doing this too often as it could become a repetitive distraction.

Handing over

At the end of your set place the microphone in the stand and leave it in the centre of the stage. Try and make sure the cable is not tangled up. Don’t turn the microphone off. Be considerate to the next person coming on stage.

If you don’t have a mic stand make sure the microphone is in your left hand when you hand it to the next person so your right hand is free to shake their hand.

This month from The Naked Speaker

This month I made my first attempt at stand up comedy performing at my club’s Stand up comedy night. Watch the video.

One year ago on The Naked Speaker

A year ago I attended Simon Bucknall’s (previous UK and Ireland public speaking champion) excellent workshop entitled The Power of persuasion. Check out my writeup.

From around the web:

Ralphie May ’s secret to writing massive quantities of comedy material!

In this interview comedian Ralphie May reveals his tactics for writing and performing stand up comedy.

No joke is ever finished. Young comics always mess up and make a mistake of not finishing their comedy. They’ll get it to where it gets a laugh and then they’ll go on to the next joke. A joke is never done. All these jokes are like rubber bands. You can expand them much further than you think. They’ll always hold a lot more. … I’ll drown them in every angle that a joke can have. Every angle.

Silence is a wonderful tool. If used properly, silence can double your laughs per minute. Use it. It adds an air of confidence. How do you use it? Before you do the punch line to a joke, if you pause you’ll get a laugh at the anticipation of the punch line. And when you hit the punch line, you’ll get another laugh. So you just doubled your laughs off that one joke.

It’s all in the voice - Some simple advice about improving your on air sound

This article offers some basic advice for improving the quality of your voice. It is targeted at radio presenters but the concepts are universal.

Many a news-reader and presenter can be found lying on the floor before they go on air getting as much air into their lungs as possible. The rationale behind this is that the more air passing through your mouth, the more complete your voice will sound.

Top Tips for Speech Evaluations from our UK & Ireland Champion

Previous UK and Ireland public speaking champion and current UK and Ireland Evaluation champion, Simon Bucknall, offers his advice for giving better evaluations. This is a great compliment to this article.

Better to focus on just TWO recommendations and do them justice than to give a shopping list of five or six different things. If you succeed in ensuring the speaker makes just one change as a result of your evaluation, you’ll have achieved more than most!

(Watch this 6:48 video on Vimeo)

Stand up is different to regular Toastmasters speeches. It’s all about jokes with very little emphasis on the overall message. I packed a lot of content into this speech and as a result it was quite difficult to memorise - and you can see I lost my place a couple of times.

This was a “clean” version of the act I have been working on in my stand up comedy course. I think that cutting out the inappropriate material actually made it better. Rather than swearing or going for shock value I had to come up with other ways to be funny - hence my jokes about Belgium.

The other acts and the compare did an excellent job. And the crowd was enthusiastic and ready to laugh creating a fantastic atmosphere.

I’m looking forward to trying stand up in a real comedy club.

(Click here to watch this 5:43 minute video on YouTube)

I was given this book as a Christmas present from my parents. This is the third book on public speaking I have received as a gift since joining Toastmasters International. Interestingly I don’t get gifts related to my other hobbies.

High Impact Speeches is written for people who write and/or deliver speeches.  Many of the examples are political or business orientated, although the concepts are universal. Richard Heller clearly and concisely describes the logistics, planning, writing and delivery of a well crafted speech (158 pages content + 30 pages of example speeches).

When I set out to review this book my plan was to write some brief chapter summaries (like I did for Teach Yourself Stand-up comedy by Logan Murray), but I found that the book was so packed with information and so succinctly written that I didn’t think summaries would do it justice. Furthermore the book provides its own summaries at the end of each chapter.

I will give you one little taster from the book. I have revisited Chapter 4 several times. In this chapter Heller proposes a simple speech plan that you can use for your high impact speech. It has puts emphasis on clarity and includes optional parts for specific events like debates or ceremonial speeches.

Simple and effective.

In the rest of the book Heller provides excellent advice about the logistics of delivering a speech, dealing with the media and constructing a press release, rhetorical techniques you should embrace or avoid, and how to avoid being embarrassed by people who disagree with you message.

My advice is to just buy this book. It’s the best book on public speaking I have read.

I really enjoyed this week’s class. My set is beginning to take shape. I’m gradually accumulating material and the different parts seem to segue into each other nicely. After the class I was so pumped with adrenaline I had difficulty sleeping.

I’ve been listening back to my jokes on my voice recorder. I’m so glad I recorded myself. It’s very validating to hear people laughing, and it means that I can analyse what I said and make improvements. I got a good laugh for a joke about my English accent, which I am very pleased with as I think I need to address this distinguishing characteristic in front of an American audience.

My strategy has been to write too much, and cut the jokes that fall flat in front of an audience. In this class I was getting good laughs for most of my jokes, but one bit got nothing:

I hate how American TV censors movies
The other night Goodfellas was on. Surely no one could censor that.
It would end up being seven minutes long
Or an hour and a half with commercials

It’s not really a joke. There’s no setup/punch. It’s an exaggeration, and not a believable one. Maybe the joke could be improved by changing the film to something more horrific. Maybe I could try and lead the audience in another direction in the setup. Like this..

I watched a seven minute movie last night
It was the censored version of Saw 6.

Still ultra lame. I’m just going to cut it and move onto something better.

I’m performing at our Toastmasters’ stand up comedy night in just over a week (6.15pm on 25th Feb, check out the website if you’re in San Diego and want to come). It should be a great evening. I’m pleased that my first time in front of an audience of more than four people will be Toastmasters, as they’re likely to be much more supportive and forgiving. But I’m slightly concerned that on a Thursday evening, straight after work, with no alcohol, they won’t be ready to laugh.  And I may have the dubious honor of going first, which means people may still be coming in. I’ll definitely need to use every trick I can think of: instruct the audience to clap the compare; get a laugh in the first 5-10 seconds; keep up the momentum of punchlines; etc.

By Friday I need decided which routines I’m going to use, remove any “unclean” jokes, flesh out any holes that might have left and add segues. Then I can spend the weekend learning it and have a trial run during next Monday’s class.

It was very cheeky to count this as a manual speech as I delivered it at the beginning of the meeting rather than in a regular speaking slot. This meant it didn’t receive an oral evaluation and I didn’t get any audience feedback slips. However the club president was happy to fill out my manual, so that’s another speech in the bag!

My personal objective for this speech was to try to present in a more conversational style. I’ve noticed that my previous speeches are quite theatrical but not very inclusive. They have suffered from meticulous planning. If I spend too long writing the speech it becomes over dramatic, and harder to recover if I make a mistake. For this speech I tried to spend most of my time planning the structure and message of this speech, then improvised around these points. It made the speech more conversational, and made it easier to get back on track after answering a question (which wouldn’t have happened in a regular speaking slot). But there is a noticeable lack of polish, there are more filler words than usual and a few mistakes.

(Watch this 6:54 video on Vimeo)

I think the combination of my speech and the workshop, that occurred later in the evening, will have won a few people round to the cause. Certainly not everybody. Most people are still adamant that they won’t take part. One person suggested that mentioning the lightning round was damaging as now people are willing to do that, but won’t go the whole hog and do a five minute speech. I think in future persuasive speeches I will only present a single option.

This speech has very narrow appeal. I doubt many people will bother watching it to the end. But that’s fine. It was aimed at a very specific group of people. I was pleased to get experience speaking when there was a need for a speech, rather than just practicing at Toastmasters meetings.

I talked about my experiences in the first class here, but I have decided not to write up the rest of the classes as they take a hands-on-approach rather than being very theory based. We’re mainly writing and honing our jokes and I don’t really want to ruin the surprise by posting them before they’re finished.

I’ve been very busy trying to put some material together. This mainly consists of sitting in Starbucks with a pad of paper brainstorming, then typing anything that I find funny into Google docs, then I make little additions and modifications as they occur to me.

Tonight was the first time I performed my jokes in front of my three other class mates.

The last hour of the each session is reserved for work-shopping jokes. Each student performs their new material on stage. They get their most important feedback from the audience’s laughter (or silence). Afterwards everyone is given the opportunity to provide further feedback, usually ideas to enhance or extend the joke.

Everyone else in my class has performed before. They’re all returning students taking the course for the second or third time. They’re all comfortable on stage and plowed through their new material without notes. It was a bit intimidating.

I hadn’t memorised my jokes/routines so I had to read mine off a piece of A4. I had printed everything in minute writing, so I didn’t get much of a chance to look at the audience. I got through them as quickly as I could. I delivered each joke desperately hoping that someone would laugh. Some of them hit. There is a little pause between delivering the punch and people laughing. That pause is excruciatingly awful, but when the laughter eventually came I felt fantastic. I had several jokes fall flat, but my classmates made a few suggestions to make them funnier, and I’ll just cut the ones that have no hope.

The ability to get imediate feedback is fantastic. And listening to other people’s jokes puts you in the right frame of mind for spotting underlying assumptions and subverting them. I asked our instructor send out everybody’s emails so we can get together on facebook. I’d like to do more group writing.

Most of the jokes I have written have turned out much more dirty than I originally intended. I don’t mind having mildly offensive material. But my inclination towards shock value was unexpected (especially as I need some clean material for the Toastmasters stand up show). Most jokes are about subverting expectations. An easy way to do this is to take an inocuous setup and swing the punchline in the direction of sex or another taboo subject. I mentioned this to my instructor who responded “you’re in the right place my friend”. It seems everyone in the class has a slightly dirty mind.

Joke writing is an interesting process. You can start off with an idea, work on it for a while and end up with a joke that has nothing to do with the original idea. I have a joke about Sarah Palin that started off as a joke about acupuncture. I have a joke about Hooters started off as a joke about peodophilia in the Catholic church (see I told you). Every joke is like a fiendish brainteaser that you can spend hours trying to solve.

I’ve got enough feedback to start removing the duds and honing what’s left. I’m going to put order them into a set and add segues and hopefully memorise it in time for next week’s lesson.

(Watch this video [6:11] on Vimeo).

The Delivery

By the time it was my turn to speak I was pumped with adrenaline. It was the first time in a while that I have felt myself shaking while onstage. During the speech I raised my arm and held it still. When I looked at my fingers I could see them quivering. I was going to keep it raised for much longer, but I was too scared the audience would see the shaking. Watching the video it really isn’t noticable. This remind’s me of Craig Valentine’s observation that any problem you have on stage is magnified ten times in your own mind, and chances are the audience won’t even notice.

I forgot a joke close to the beginning, and I had an unintentionally long pause towards the end. But overall the audience seemed to enjoy themselves and the feedback was positive. It goes to show that audiences is willing to forgive occasional errors, as long as the overall content and structure are sound.

Feedback

The most common recomendation I received was that the ending was too abrupt. I completely agree. Usually I like to end my speeches by summarising the message of the speech. Unfortunately the “message” was very weak, having been completely contrived to allow me to do the crane from the Karatie Kid. If I had to rewrite the ending I would proably try and make it more applicable to the audience by throwing in the word “you” and asking a rhetorical question. Don’t you think that would be a good idea?