I don’t know what it is, but I can’t seem to put together a presentation without throwing in a joker somewhere. You?
So I am giving a community seminar on a technical topic next week, and I’ve polished the presentation nicely (NOT in PowerPuke, thankyaver’much). Then my evil demon took over and I put a new WELCOME slide at the beginning, followed by an artful title slide for that perennial New England favorite… “How to Knit Your Own PUMPKIN SPICE Socks.”
“The joke being, of course, that due to his enormous size, as you can see, it appears that Marmaduke is the one taking Billy for a walk, and not vice versa. Moving on— the sexual exploitation of children continues to be a major problem in countries around the world…”
I’ve done very few, very short presentations, so there was never really a chance to have fun. But eons ago, I was in an Effective Writing seminar which, while useful, was pretty dry. At one point, there was a slide (yes, slide - this was in the 80s!) showing an adorable puppy with a gun held to its head. The caption read “Stay awake or the dog dies!” It was a well-placed and well-needed break in the tedium.
I open with a joke, close with a joke, and throw a lot in the middle. For the actual subject material I’m very terse. The reality is that the prepared material for most presentations is a waste of time. People can just read it themselves. The value, if any is the questions, answers, and discussion that follows. If you can’t make your presentations entertaining then make them brief.
Or preferably both. When I took my Basic Instructors Course in the military we were taught to throw in a bit of humour to loosen the class up before trudging through the material. This short video was one of my favourites to put in ( I can’t find the original vid but the audio is the same), especially for the really dry technical stuff.
I’m of the firm opinion that visuals for a presentation must be one of the following:
[ol]
[li]Essential to audience understanding;[/li][li]Contain information that is difficult to convey verbally;[/li][li]A brief anchor for two to three minutes of the talk (as much to keep the speaker on track as guide the audience);[/li][li]Omitted.[/li][/ol]
Slide after slide of useless crap, or worst, a vast amount of text that the presenter slowly reads to you, should be felonies.
But yeah, a joke or two, woven into the material or very selectively outta left field… can really put some zing in a session.
For most of the presentations I give, the most successful/valuable part is the discussion. I think that by being a little irreverent about the material, I set the tone that it is okay to challenge some of the information during the discussion part. As an example, in the presentation I talk about how there are limited resources, so it was decided to fund A instead of B. In the discussion, I really want people to question that, because that gets into a lot of issues about how we evaluate A vs. B in the first place. So I might describe A vs. B as Voldemort vs. Dumbledore.
Also I like making really dumb jokes and when I am the presenter, at least I have a captive audience.
Every freaking day. I present maybe 9 times a week, and almost every presentation has a few jokes, puns, asides, etc. in it somewhere. If they laugh, great. If they don’t, I say “Sometimes they’re just for me” and motor on.
I keep putting Marvin the Paranoid Android at the end of my PowerPoints. It’s fun to see who gets it and if anyone says anything about it. It says “Don’t panic” on it so I think it fits.
In graduate school 1 hour before any talk given by lab mates (biochemistry), we handed them a list of 3 random words that they had to use in their presentation (for instance: ice cream cone, caboose, ostrich) that they had to use in their public talk (once or twice a year). If they used all three, everyone else covered their food and drinks for the next event. If they failed, they bought everyone’s beer. It was a challenge to come up with the most creative use of the words as usually they were used to describe a protein shape or feature. I remember ice cream cone because it was a new foreign student to the game and he used it like 20 times during the talk, and we were just dying laughing in the audience.
I had to present a “Technology Roadmap” to the CEO at my past company, and on the title page, I put a picture of the Three Stooges from the episode where they were plumbers, up to their ankles in water with water pouring from the pipes, etc.
Yeah, that just gets you a talk from HR these days.
I like to use a little humor in them, but my previous boss was fanatically angry at the idea there would be anything other than 100% dry bones information. Haven’t had to give/create any under my current boss.
“Say, have you folks ever dismissed a popular product with a put-down that alters part of its name to something insulting? Sometimes I like to call WeatherTech WeatherSuck. And don’t get me started on Gillette Poops On. Anyway, How To Build A Bird Feeder - or, as I call it, a Turd Feeder.”
Aww, PF still has the hobby of following me around to threadshit. How sweet. Let me fuel your fury a little -
I consider PowerPoint to be the worst computer application ever released by a major software maker, by a wide margin. The persistence of all its worst characteristics through generation after generation and its adoption as the basic tool of business communication is beyond confounding. It’s pure digital shit in a box, and like most of the Office suite gets used for far too many things it’s not good at, which isn’t surprising since it’s not good at anything including its nominal purposes.
WeatherTech makes great stuff. I just washed puppy barf off my 8yo cargo liner for the umptieth time, and despite the years and lots of wear and being stored in poor conditions a lot, it’s… well, it doesn’t look new but it’s in perfect physical condition. Ditto for the floor mats I’ve put in five or six cars. Not one complaint about the products. The abysmal CS, up to the owner, however…
When lecturing on mathematics, visuals are absolutely necessary. Typically, in an hour lecture I would fill three blackboards at least twice over. Now with slides, I try to put everything I would have to write on the board on a slide and keep everything I would say off it. So I would put a slide up for a minute or two and then talk about what it is saying and what it means. I have never used power point, but always use the mathematical typesetting language TeX, beamer class for slides. It works well, especially allowing overlays which are awfully useful. I gave such a talk about a month ago.
I rate the success of my presentations on the laughs I get. But the jokes need to be relevant to the material, not thrown in willy nilly. Start with a regular joke and you lose half the audience who have heard it already.
I was talking about a particular test method which gave high quality results but which also produced a lot of false positives, and how it might not be useful everywhere. I illustrated this by saying
“It makes sense to use it in space probes, where a failure can scrub the mission and cost millions of dollars. But think about a video game console. What’s the worst thing that can happen if there is a failure - some kid will do his homework.”
I had tested this on the road, and it always got a laugh, and it did also in a big room at a big conference. The best thing was that a guy who was really for this method told me he was going to challenge me on it, but when I told that joke he got it and didn’t think it was a good idea.
Never put the joke on the slide. You never telegraph your punch line.
