Public Speaking Course:

One-Liners

A one-liner in your presentation is the use of a very short piece of humor. One-liners can be the best and quickest way to add humor in your presentation. These quick pieces of comedy are quick and easy to deliver. If you are not sure about adding a lot of funny material to your speech, try practicing one-liners in your public speaking course.

Audiences likes when you use one-liners so they can get a quick mental break from the informative material. Keeping the audience alert is important to what you use from your public speaking course. Also, if the audience is there to get high levels of content, they don't feel you wasted their time with long stories and jokes.

A good source for one-liners you can use is a small and inexpensive paperback called 'Today's Chuckle: 2500 Great One-Liners for Every Occasion' by Paul Harlan Collins. There are 25 categories in all and I can't imagine a talk that wouldn't benefit from one of these selections.

This book has categories such as "Affairs of State and Other Political Indiscretions" where you might find the one-liner:
"Politicians are like polkas. They have different names, but they all sound alike."
or the category 'Money and the Meaning of Life' where you would see truisms like:
"Prosperity is that period between the last installment and the next purchase.'

You'll run across one-liners everywhere once you start looking for them, and then you can add them to your growing list. Some will even have two lines. Write them down too for future use.

Just for fun, here are some of my favorites:

Take my advice: I don't use it anyway.

He who smiles in a crisis has found someone to blame.

My mind works like lightning. One brilliant flash and it is gone.

Thanks to automatic teller machines you are always conveniently close to being broke.

Behind every successful person stands a bunch of amazed co-workers.

Computers can do complicated mathematical calculations in 1/100,000 second, but the invoices still go out 10 days late.

My accountant is shy and retiring. He's $250,000 shy. That's why he's retiring.

How are you supposed to teach a kid what clockwise means when he's wearing a digital GI Joe watch?

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