Hi, I'm Conor Cunneen - IrishmanSpeaks, your "Chief Learner" for this course on Adding Humor to your Presentation. A proud Corkman, I've been working on my Chicago accent for more than twenty years now!!

So, here I am, happily exiled in a city where the Guinness is good, the natives are friendly and I have been force fed more corned beef and green beer than I ever had in Ireland!!

Yup, that's your Chief Learner....

Yup, that's your Chief Learner up there, when I played Goalkeeper for my hometown soccer team in Midleton, Co. Cork. I was known as "The Cat," mainly I think because I gave my fellow defenders kittens!! 

I was also referred to as Batman because I was "blind as a bat" and never had any idea who scored goals for us at the other end of the field!! But fine specimens of Irish 'yute' we were and one soccer ball to our name. Seriously, we did have only one football. It never occurred to us that we would benefit from more than one! Ah, those were "the good old days."

Manchester United never came calling, so today I earn a crust as a keynote speaker whose mission is to Improve People, Performance & Productivity - with a Smile! The brand is IrishmanSpeaks!

Some people refer to me as a Humorous Motivational Speaker. What this means is that I present good business programs, littered with large dollops of humor, insights and a little bit of BS (that's Brilliant Stories, folks - although sometimes it is appropriate BS). The objective and the result is to keep my audience engaged, connected AND leaving with a smile on the face, a spring in the step AND memorable, actionable takeaways to make sure my client is satisfied.

At one stage....

At one stage, I would have written "I have been lucky enough to win Chicago Humorous Speaker of the Year," but I no longer say that. I won Chicago Humorous Speaker of the Year because I did what I encourage you to do. I worked hard on developing the content and message, reworked the content and message and then polished, reworked, rehearsed and finally presented the content and message.  The speech was a goofball one on Customer Service in San Quentin Prison! 

To hone my skill set....

To hone my skill set, I regularly do open-mic comedy in a number of clubs here in the Chicago area or when I am traveling. Like most people at open-mic, I die regularly on stage, as another zinger fails to incite the raucous laughter I imagined in my dreams! 

I can live with this because I am not a comic. I will never take business from Kevin Hart!. However, I am a speaker who consistently adds relevant humorous content to my solid business messages to make the message engaging and memorable and you can do the same. 

The objective of the program on Adding Humor to your Presentation.....

The objective of this program is to ADD humor to your speeches and programs.

It is not to create a comedy routine although it will definitely help.

When you implement the various elements of this course, you WILL have the ability to put a smile on your audience's face three, four, five times in a presentation. I promise you, that will be sufficient for you to generate engagement and audience reaction that will provide you with comments like "Great speech and very funny as well." Yes! Audience reactions that will get you invited back.

Onwards, My Friends. Onwards!