TJ Walker (host) gives live advice on public speaking, focusing on using spontaneous humor to defuse tension after high-profile mistakes. He analyzes Jimmy Kimmel's off-the-cuff reference to Steve Harvey during the Oscars mistake as an effective, topical, audience-aware joke, and draws practical implications: be relaxed, know your audience's cultural touchpoints, and cultivate stage experience. The segment closes with a prompt to follow TJ Walker on Facebook for more tips.
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I'm TJ Walker and I help people speak their best. Because how you present is often the number one factor in your success. There was a huge, huge blunder at last night's Oscar Awards where the wrong Best Picture was announced. Horrible disaster. Pricewaterhouse looked like fools with this. But one person came out ahead, I believe, and that was the host, Jimmy Kimmel. In just a moment's notice, he said, personally, I blame Steve Harvey. Now this got a chuckle from the audience. For those who really follow pop culture news, Steve Harvey famously back in 2015, announced the wrong Miss Universe. Now, obviously he had nothing to do with this, but that is the perfect use of humor in any presentation. It is in reaction to something that just happened. So it clearly wasn't written out and workshopped and rehearsed a thousand times. My guess is Jimmy Kimmel thought of it off the top of his head, although he could have had a writer whispering it through an earpiece. Regardless, it was quick, it was fast, it was topical, and it reduced tension. At a time when people are feeling anxious and nervous, it reduced tension. That's the best use of humor. Now, in order to do that, you have to be aware of everything else your audience is aware of. For an entertainment crowd, a lot of them are in fact aware of Steve Harvey's famous blunder of announcing the wrong Miss Universe winner. That's what made it work. But if you want to be good at this, several things have to happen. You have to be comfortable enough, relaxed enough to actually think. Most people, if you're on a stage and hundreds of millions of people are watching, or even hundreds of people, you freeze, you get nervous, you can't think, you have an out of body experience. That's why it is smart. And that's why you normally see the master of ceremonies for an event like this. Someone who's really seasoned, who has been on a stage in front of large live audiences for years and years. Jimmy Kimmel has clearly done that as a host of a late night TV show. So he's able to think on his feet. He was able to bring in something topical, he was able to reference something well known. You can't do that unless you're really up on everything your audience knows about. So this applies whether you are giving a Kiwanis speech, an acceptance speech, a trade industry conference at a chemical association, manufactures. It works all the time. And your audience will give you tremendous credit if you can come up with humor that is in quick reaction to something that just happened, especially something bad that just happened. If you want more tips on public speaking presentation skills, please come back to this page often and like the page, it's facebook.com TJ Walker speak to Influence.
