The Business of Being Funny

My sophomore year in high school, I had to take a speech class that I absolutely DREADED. Public speaking was never my forte. I’m just not comfortable with standing up in front of a room full of people and having the attention focused on me as I try to remain calm and collected. I don’t care how many people I have to visualize naked, I’m just not cut out for public speaking.

Throughout the class, we explored different genres of speeches. The one I dreaded the most ended up being my most memorable: the comedic speech. I envisioned standing up in front of my peers trying to deliver silly jokes to keep them entertained. I was not a funny person, there was no way I was going to be able to get through this. That is, until I realized that delivering speeches is just like telling a story. That, I figured I could do.

When it was my turn to get up and be funny, I held onto to my index cards, desperately trying to memorize all the funny parts of my speech that were supposed to make my audience roar with laughter…or even get me a courtesy laugh. My comedic speech revolved around an experience that took place that summer at my family’s beach house. My sister, friends and I were walking on the pier and gawking at a hot surfer boy we named “Surf Hut boy” because he worked at a shop called the Surf Hut. Long story short, we ended up following him home – okay, we were stalking him actually. My sister was on crutches that weekend from an unfortunate skim boarding incident and was slowing us down so we left her behind in order to continue to follow Surf Hut boy. Looking back, the story itself really isn’t that funny, but for some reason my classmates were laughing from the get-go, and at parts that I didn’t think were funny at all. Maybe I was funny, after all! With a newfound ego boost, I put aside the index cards and just told my story. Of course, as any good storyteller does, I embellished some of the details making the situation seem more dramatic than it actually was, but the story remained true.

By the end of my speech, I felt liberated. I got up and stood in front of my peers and they in return rewarded me with real laughter, validating that I really could go up in front of a crowd and make them laugh. Now, I’m not a stand-up comic by any means, but I do have the confidence to tell stories and find ways to bring out the funnier parts of them and make people laugh. That’s actually something I really enjoy and am so grateful that I discovered that I can be funny without really trying. There, I said it.