Here I am yesterday! On the Riverfront of Savannah, GA – 10 second video is above!
Here I am in Savannah. . see the 10 second video!
Ok, so I was just performing my comedy at a conference last night in Savannah, Georgia to a group who is BIG on networking. And while they had several keynote and breakout sessions throughout the day, they really emphasized that people need to stay in the meeting and network which means “networking” is a great place to hone in on some humor for this group. And as luck would have it, one networking event they had was something called “Speed Networking.” So to do some quick humor, I used a trick that many comics from other countries do when they perform here in the U.S.. . I pretended that I didn’t understand. Yacov Smirnoff, a popular Russian comic in the 80’s pretty much made this tactic famous by pretending he didn’t know the American Way – even though he had lived here for a while. So I pretended not to understand Speed Networking and I confused it with more popular activity of Speed Dating. This gave me a great opening joke:
”Did you all enjoy the Speed Networking? I was confused, I thought it was Speed Dating. Now I have to apologize to some of you because I think I asked some very inappropriate questions!”
This got a good laugh, but then, since I had sat in on the morning session and listened to their terminology, I was able to tag it with a term their CEO used, by saying “hey, your ceo told us this morning that she wanted everyone to “get engaged” today, so I was just trying my best.”
That got a good laugh too, and then I tagged it again by making an analogy with some of the things we find out in Speed Dating, and I came up with “By the way, I found out that 2 guys here are in their 40’s and still living at home.”
Again, it got a nice laugh and I ended up with three funny lines altogether. So next time you’re struggling to come up with a line, use your advantage of NOT knowing a person, place, thing, event or activity to make the joke. Sometimes ignorance can be bliss!
Jan