I am Joe's Funny Bone

       Everyone in the class – the 10^th grade English class wherein everyone had been assigned the seemingly impossible task of each giving a speech that would elicit an emotion from someone in the audience – every single person went for the joke, they went for the laugh. Except for one.

         It seemed kind of obvious when it was over. What other emotion could one really go for? And I have thought about it ever since. Why the laugh?

         Often a person new to the personal storytelling audience will ask, “how is this different from stand-up comedy?” And it is a legitimate question because the person who had just been on stage telling probably had the audience laughing through the entire story. My answer to that question is that stand-up comedy is usually a series of rat-a-tat-tat one-liners, topical jokes of the day, whereas personal storytelling often builds up to a very funny outcome with amusing side-comments along the way. And the story connects us all – sometimes it is funny merely because we identify so strongly with what is going on.

        And being funny is a tool in other speeches also. Politicians and preachers more and more often incorporate a joke into their talks – if you think someone is going to make you laugh, you pay more attention. Once a preacher or politician has your attention, you are more likely to listen to what else he or she has to say. The joke is a hook.

        And often times corporate speeches have stories built in to them, “let me tell you about Joe who worked for 20 years and never wore a safety helmet....” because then the speaker has your attention, you care about Joe, you sit up and listen because you want to know what happened to Joe. After the speech, you might remember Joe's story and with that memory, you might even remember the rest of what the speaker had to say and take those words to heart. I am fairly sure there are whole books of these stories for corporate speakers to tap into – they are that valuable to the talks and in making the orators sound good.

        So everyone in the class except for one person went for the laughs in the elicit-an-emotion-from-the-audience assignment. We weren't such a tough crowd as I had earlier predicted - we laughed when each speaker hoped we would, and everyone got an A.

And before I tell you all about that one person who did not go for the laugh, I will explain what Miss Caffarelli had in mind when she gave us the assignment – what her experiment was all about.

         She said that when we arrived in class on that very first day of the school year, she discovered quickly that we were terrible writers! Miss Caffarelli then had an idea. If we were required to speak what we had written, we would be more likely to put our words together better; we would have tenses that matched; we'd have a beginning, a middle, and an end and not ramble like we do in essays. She said that we would care about what we wrote if we had to present our words orally to an audience – we wouldn't want to be embarrassed by our poor English.

        So the big experiment was for us to give speeches to the class and the oral exercise would improve our writing. The whole elicit-an-emotion from the audience part of the assignment was, I guess, just an add-on. Oh my gosh – to have one's gut wrenched for the sake of a piece of writing that made 10^th grade sense!

        And the experiment was a success. Kind of. Miss Caffarelli was thrilled with the outcome after everyone had given a speech. She said the talks were well spoken and well written.

         Could we keep the momentum going?

         Miss Caffarelli asked us to do it all again! New speeches that would reflect good writing. Round two did not have to elicit emotions – I don't recall if there was a topic or not. I just remember that we apparently did not care as much the second time around. Some students were unprepared when they got up to talk; I have no recollection of what I had to say that time.

        And there was no round 3. Apparently our writing was not going to improve with the forced speeches after all.

        But golly, how this whole exercise has clung to me!

245 20150902 I Am Joe's Funny Bone