Ep 10 Should Bernie Sanders Use More Humor?

Should politicians use more humor?

Speaking the show about effective speaking in public, to the media, at work and in life. Speaking with TJ Walker.

So this question comes in from one of our YouTube viewers, MGM Studios. He writes, I've heard some comedians wanting to give Bernie Sanders some jokes to enhance his message. Can adding someone else's jokes or stories come across as inauthentic or can it work? Well, the answer to both questions is yes and yes. Sometimes it can work and sometimes it can come across as inauthentic. Here's the problem with politicians and humor. So much of humor is an attack. You're making fun of someone, you're needling someone. Now, if you're Don Rickles, that can work. And for that matter, if you're Donald Trump, that can work. But for most politicians, most of the time, it can be challenging. It can be difficult. Those of you who are longtime students of politics well may well remember that Bob dole in the 70s, 80s, early 90s always had a reputation of being a tremendous wit. But then when he ran for president and got the 1996 Republican nomination, he seemed dour. He didn't seem funny anymore. He just seemed mean sometimes. And that's the problem is humor often doesn't translate at the presidential level. Now, let me address the first part of your question. Comedians want Bernie Sanders to use more humor. Well, comedians want everybody to use more humor. They look at the world entirely through the lens of humor. The goal of a politician is not to get more laughs. Now, they don't mind that. But the job of a politician is to get votes, to get into office, to do things, to change public policy. So that is the first goal of a politician. Now, if you can make people laugh, if you seem like you have a good sense of humor, that makes you more likable. Certainly Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, they all seem like people who have nice senses of humor. Regardless of your politics, they all did a good job at the annual Gridiron and other correspondence dinners in the spring where presidents get up and tell jokes. But that's different from using a lot of humor during campaign season. Here's the other problem you mentioned. Bernie Sanders in particular, he is known as kind of a no nonsense, no frills guy, a guy who really wants to talk about very, very serious economic matters, matters of economic inequality. Whether you agree with him or not, that's his position. That's kind of his shtick. So no frills. He's constantly attacking other politicians for delving into frivolous things. So you could make the case that a lot of humor that he might use might actually undercut his reputation. So you got to be careful about that. The best humor, the very best humor, is when it's authentic to you and if you're a politician, when it doesn't cause you problems. Perhaps the best practitioner I can think of in that regard was Ronald Reagan, because he was the master at making fun of himself. If you make fun of yourself, no one else can get offended, no one else can take umbrage, no one else can attack you. If you attack yourself, that's generally the safest way of doing it. But you have to be credible first. You have to be seen as a very serious, viable candidate of public official before you do that. Because if you just get up and start making fun of yourself, then that can undercut your sense of gravitas and might not necessarily inspire people to talk to you or to take you seriously in an incredible manner. Let's talk about some of the very specifics involved with how to deliver humor as a politician.

Body language.

The biggest problem most people have when they are delivering a one liner or a joke is they'll rush it. They'll say it like ha, ha ha. And they step on their own time, they step on their own laugh lines. Part of what you have to do if you're going to deliver a joke is pause. Sometimes you don't even move, you stop. You give the audience a chance to think about it, digest it, and respond to you in the form of laughter. Now let's go a little deeper into the specifics of what works best for most politicians using humor in presentations. As I mentioned, self deprecating humor. The best example I could think of was in 1984 when President Ronald Reagan was up for re election. He had a very, very poor performance in the first political debate. I remember it well, was covering it and analyzing it for my college newspaper at the time, the Chronicle at Duke University. And Reagan looked like he was out of it. He looked like Alzheimer's had set in and indeed, perhaps it had the beginnings of it. So when the second debate came around, everyone knew one of the first questions reporters would be asking is, at age almost 74, are you sure you're up for the rigors of the presidency? Are you perhaps too old? Everyone knew it was coming and Roger Ailes fed him a line during the debate preparation, if you're asked this and he told him what to say. So sure enough, when the debate came out, Reagan was asked about his fitness for office, his General health. His response was, I refuse to make the youth and inexperience of my opponent an issue in this campaign. And everybody burst out laughing. That's because Walter Mondale was, I believe, over 60 at the time, had been vice president, a senator, a mayor, had a long, long, long track record in public office for decades. So nobody thought he was youthful or inexperienced. So it was a funny, funny thing. He was twisting and turning the whole issue of age as if it were somehow his advantage. And it was done in such a funny way, no one ever dared bring up the issue again. Now you can make the case that reporters were perhaps derelict not probing that issue, and they shouldn't have let just a one liner diffuse the issue. But that is how it happened. And folks, that is the best way of using humor as a politician tactically. You're getting people to laugh, you're getting people to like you, you're getting people to feel better about you as a human, and you're helping yourself politically by taking certain negatives off the table. So a very, very masterful way of doing that. Now, humor occasionally got Ronald Reagan in trouble. He famously apparently thought the microphone wasn't on, said we begin bombing the Soviet Union in five minutes. Well, he was just making a joke. But when you're president of the United States and you do have your finger on that button to start nuclear war, especially back in the 1980s when the cold War was still going on, a lot of people didn't find that funny. And that was a bit of a crisis for a while. I'm going to give you really the best way of using humor. That's the easiest way to use humor for most people, even if you don't think of yourself as a comedian.

Inside Dope the craft of Media and presentation training.

What I try to do when I'm working with a colleague, working with a client is figure out how can they naturally put in humor in a way that doesn't seem artificial. It doesn't seem like they read a Milton Verle joke book the night before. That doesn't seem canned or phony. The best way to do it is to be comfortable enough in your presentations so that you can be completely alert to what is going around you. And that means practicing and rehearsing. That's the part I come in if I'm rehearsing them. But you can do that as well on your own. So let me give you an example. Just yesterday I was giving a keynote speech in front of not a large audience, 150 people on you Guessed it. Public speaking skills. The person introduced, and I didn't have a lot of jokes or a lot of canned one liners planned, but the person introducing me talked about how nervous he was. Introducing, speaking, and introducing someone who's a speaking expert. And early on in his presentation, his remarks, introductory remarks, he said, my biggest fear is that the speaker will get up and say, just don't do it like that. And then he continued to talk for another three minutes. And frankly, he did an excellent job. He was a good speaker. He had some other housekeeping matters to go over for the employees who all did report to him. He introduced me, had some flair and panache, but he introduced me, walked away from the lectern. The spotlight was on me. I didn't say anything for two seconds and then I just said in a low energy, low key tone of voice, just don't do it like that. Everybody laughed. Everybody chuckled. It wasn't anything I planned, obviously, but it was a way of responding to him. It was a call. They call that in comedy a callback. You're calling back something that people heard earlier. And it just makes it funny because of the context. It wasn't a well written joke. It was just being alert. It was sort of making fun of their boss. Everyone likes it when their boss is being made fun of. And what it did. The reason I did it is not just to get a laugh, although I like getting laughs. Because if someone's laughing, an audience member is laughing, it means they're not sleeping. It means they're not completely consumed with the contents of their cell phone or their email. So it is good to get laughs from time to time. But the other reason I did it is it shows to people that I was present. I was listening to him. I'm here to have a conversation with them. I'm not just going to deliver my same canned speech the same way I always do. Even though a good portion of my speech was canned in the sense it was stuff I had prepared, messages I thought were really important examples. I thought of stories I'd rehearsed. There's nothing wrong with a presentation being canned if it's good stuff in the can. But when you have good stuff and you've planned and you've prepared, you need to be light on your feet. You need to be constantly looking for opportunities that you can react to. Now, this comes from either a lot of experience or a lot of practice. Because when you are nervous, you can't listen carefully because you're thinking about, oh my gosh, how am I going to start my speech. Did I memorize this just right? Do I have the slides in the right order? So most speakers, even if they're witty and comfortable and funny one on one with small groups, they often lose that when they stand up in front of people. It's not that they suddenly lost their sense of humor. It's that they're so uncomfortable, they can't be in the moment and they can't actually listen to someone. So, so much of humor that works for most people is just being comfortable enough to to listen and then react back. The audience will often reward you. Let's go to questions.

Send questions to J. Walker.

Remember, all of your questions that are sent are answered here. I answer them personally. I answer them on future shows. So please, please send me the questions. You can post them wherever you see this or hear this program, whether it is on Facebook, YouTube, my website@mediatrainingworldwide.com or you can always just email me infoediatrainingworldwide.com now, it works both ways. You can ask me questions, but I get to ask you questions too. My question for you is, who do you think is the funniest business or government speaker you've seen in the last five years? I don't mean the funniest person. It's easy to pick Jerry Seinfeld or Chris Rock or some famous comedian. That's their job. But I want to know of speakers you've seen in the business world. Who do you think is the best speaker out there in terms of using humor effectively? Now, I do want to address one other question that was sent in. This was also sent by the same gentleman at MGM Studios. And I don't know if he works for MGM Studios. That's simply his name on YouTube. DJ, I have encouraged my kids to do middle school and high school speech and debate. What are your thoughts on the importance of starting young? Well, part of my thought is middle school and high school is not too young to learn how to speak. If I wrote to someone and said I'd like to encourage my children, my daughter, how to write, I'm thinking of sending her to her first day of school and learning how to write English at age 12 in middle school, I think you would say, DJ, you're a monster. You're guilty of abuse. If you have kept your child out of any kind of writing instruction until she's 12 or until she's in high school at 14 or 15, most of you would look at me like I'm crazy. If I'd never given My daughter formal instruction on how to communicate through writing. Well, that's kind of how I feel when it comes to public speaking. You should be teaching your children how to speak. Speak effectively as early as possible. If it's first grade and they have to talk about what they like to do in show and tell, practice that at home, practice on video, hold up your cell phone, practice with your child and encourage them with positive reinforcement. That's the number one thing. Talk about what they did. Well, don't tell them they did this wrong. Oh, my gosh, you said two ums. Little Johnny, you'll never be a success. Don't do that. Record and give positive reinforcement on what they did. Now, the second part of your question is a lot more complicated. Your question about high school debate. I'm going to upset some people here, and I was active in college debate, although I did, I believe it was the Lincoln Douglas style. Here is the problem with high school debate in its purest form today. It has, in my view, fetishized data dumping. The more facts you get across, the more points you get with the judges, the more likely you are to win. In every other aspect of life, this is the exact opposite of what is truly effective. So I have a hard time justifying telling someone to put their kid in something that is going to take hours and hours and hours of work, thought research, and will actually make them worse communicators. You heard me right, folks. High school debate and college debate as it is currently practiced in the United States and some other country will make you a worse communicator because you are speaking so quickly. It rewards and in my view, fetishizes speaking so quickly, dumping so much data to score these artificial points in the debate competition. Meanwhile, the average person who isn't a part of the debate community can't even understand a word these kids are saying. It's like entering a writing competition and rewarding a student for not using periods, commas, paragraph breaks and rewarding a student for using the smallest font. I never really thought of it, but that's a perfect analogy. I have to tell you, you wouldn't ever encourage your child to enter a writing contest and encourage people not to use periods, commas, paragraph breaks, and to use the smallest font possible. Why would you want them to practice that when it comes to public speaking? Because when you speak really, really quickly and you don't pause and you don't come up with air, that's what you're doing. You're stripping out the commas, you're stripping out the periods and you're stripping out the paragraph breaks, the page breaks, the chapter breaks. This is how normal human ears process information when they hear it. Now, I'm more than happy to take dissenting views on this program from those of you who think that I'm really missing something with high school debate. So those of you active in the high school debate community, and by the way, if you did it 30 or 40 years ago, it's different. It's not like that anymore. It's gotten so much faster and therefore, I would argue, irrelevant. But I'd love to hear from you again. Post your comments anywhere you see or hear this program, and I will address that in future programs. I'm TJ Walker. Thanks for joining me for this weekend edition of Speaking. As always, may all of your speaking opportunities in life be a huge success.

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