19 Sep 2017 - Humour

September 23, 2017

Laughter is the best medicine they say. This week, we had an exciting series of events for our chapter meeting. The theme of this meeting was on humour, and some of you might be wondering, "What's the occasion?" Well, this is because we had our internal humorous speech contest, as well as an evaluation contest to take our public speaking skills to the next level! Andy, Jordan and Rajesh took part in the humorous speech contest.

Our meeting kick started with Toastmasters Andy, doing a combination of a humorous speech and a project 8 (Visual Aids), titled "A swipe for a date". In an engaging manner, he shared an engaging story about his experiences with Tinder ;)

TM Andy

Next up, Toastmasters Jordan, gave a speech titled "Mindfulness". He shared about the importance of being mindful and how important it is for one to be living in the present. Isn't this subject so relevant in our society today? So many of us are caught up with working, stressing about other things and looking forward to the future that we forget how to live in the present moment, the now. After all, quoting Master Oogway from Kungfu Panda, "Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, and today is a gift... that's why they call it present"

TM Jordan

Last but certainly not least, Toastmasters Rajesh shared funny stories about him and his family - stories about his children, his wife and her cooking with Dahl and this kept all of us laughing throughout the session!

TM Rajesh

With that, the humorous speech contest for prepared speeches was over. In addition to the humorous speech contest, as mentioned at the start of this blog post, we also had an Evaluation contest - with contestants Christina, Mike, Wen Zhong and Rajesh. Lorus, a visiting toastmaster as well as the appointed test speaker for this lovely evening, gave a speech on "3 Tips to speak like a PRO" - P for Passion, R for Repetition, and O for One Impactful Headline!

The contestants were given a couple of minutes thereafter to plan and organise their speech and they were to give an evaluation speech based on what they've just heard! (So in essence, they had to give a speech BASED ON a speech!)

(apologies, I was too engrossed in the speeches I had forgotten to snap some photos!)

Well, the night doesn't end here. We of course had our usual Table Topics Session, with funny topics such as "My boss told me to have a good day, So I went home" as well as "Every time you find some humour in a difficult situation, you win". The session this time was conducted none other than our club president, Vincent!

The table topics speeches were hilarious and it definitely kept all of us entertained. Forevermore, personally I felt that the topics for this meeting were quite tough so the participants were challenged (which is a good thing, of course!)

One of my most memorable quotes from the session was from our test speaker Lorus, who, in response to "My boss told me to have a good day, So I went home", said "I hope one day I can tell my boss to go home." Irene, a visiting toastmaster, also cracked jokes about sunglasses in response to the question "The Alphabet has 26 letters. If A didn't work, stay cool"

We thank all the participants that took part in this contest as well as the people (timers, test speakers, too many to list!) who made this meeting possible! Special thanks to our Area Director Celine for always being so supportive of us and encouraging us to improve.