Good Conversation Tips:
Is Your Humor Helping or Hurting Your Message?

In the blink of an ear, a conversation starter can turn into a conversation stopper. Before you speak, especially in public, consider your audience. Who are they? What are they like? How do they talk? In other words, be considerate of your audience. Like Mary Poppins’ spoonful of sugar, your humor should help your message go down.

Mary Poppins Would Have Soaped His Mouth
If it had been my first time hearing this guy on a teleseminar, I would have tuned him out on the spot. He is a VERY big-time public speaker and internet marketer, a mentor, a guru.

What, you might be asking, could have put my ears in a twist? Here’s the gist of the start of the conversation:

Interviewer: “Welcome to the call. I’d been hearing about you long before we met.”
Mr. Bigtime: “Honest, I didn’t know she was only 13.”
Me, the listener: WHAT?!?!?!

His words put my brain into spin cycle: “She was only 13, only 13, only 13.” It began to sound like that Sam Cooke song “Only Sixteen,” but with pedophile lyrics.

I could not believe someone would say that about himself. In public. On a recorded call. With an audience of strangers, including many women and possibly teenagers.

You’d have to hypnotize me to make my brain remember the next 8 minutes of the conversation. I was thinking about 13 and the secret life of Mr. Bigtime. I was not listening to the new information. I was seeing him in a new light: offensive orange.

A Different Style of Humor
Did Mr. Bigtime intend his comment to be a joke’s-on-me kind of guy humor? Men play King of the Mountain all the time. They tease each other with putdowns. It’s a game of Poke-a-Friend-in-the-Ribs. That’s a guy-style of humor, and I’m not criticizing it. It has its place.

If you want to know more about gender differences in conversation, check out You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation by Deborah Tannen.

What’s important here is the effect of humor in conversation and on whomever is listening. The interviewer was using the introduction to build rapport. Mr. Bigtime turned a conversation starter into a conversation stopper.

Is There a Pattern Here?
Darned if he didn't do it again. This time a new interviewer, Jake, got poked in the ribs. Jake was excited about the first time he sold a hundred books to his audience. Later he danced a victory jig in the men’s room: “I made $1,500, and it was so easy!”

Mr. Bigtime said, “I’ve never made any money in the men’s room.” He implied that Jake had been paid for drugs or sex.

Jeepers! There’s that guy humor again. Plus bathroom humor.

Again, it floored me. And it wasn’t a nice carpeted floor either. It was dirty tile.

Mr. B, I Have a Message for You:
Go directly to jail. Do not pa…. Oh, never mind. Reader, what would you tell this guy?

And now I'd like to invite you to discover how good conversation questions can grease the path to deeper friendship. Get  *free* copy of "15 Fun, Free, and Original Ice Breakers & Conversation Questions for Parties, Dates, and Hanging Out With Friends." Go to http://www.queenofconversation.com/15-Sure-Fire-Conversation-Starters.html

©Tracey E. Bennett, The Queen of Conversation
October, 2008

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