Humor is a valuable asset for tour guides. While not essential, a well-timed joke or lighthearted comment can significantly enhance the tour experience, making it more enjoyable and memorable for participants. People are naturally drawn to laughter, surprise, and captivating stories about interesting individuals and places. A successful tour, at its core, is a form of entertainment, making it worthwhile to explore ways to effectively integrate humor into your presentations.
The key lies in finding the right balance. While there are numerous avenues to explore humor, forcing jokes often leads to awkwardness and detracts from the overall experience.
Here’s a breakdown of how to incorporate humor into your tour guide style:
- Learn from the Pros: Watch comedy tour content to get a sense for pacing, delivery, and content. Pay attention to how jokes land and adapt for your own delivery.
- Find Inspiration: Seek out examples of successful tour guides who utilize humor effectively. Beefeater Bill, a humorous English tour guide known for his tours at the Tower of London, offers a great example of how to integrate humor into historical storytelling. His approach involves adopting a stern military persona, which contrasts amusingly with the expectations of a typical tour guide.
To connect with ‘Beefeater’ Bill Callaghan, you can find his website and Twitter account below!
https://twitter.com/intent/user?screen_name=BillyBeefeater
Key Elements of Humor in Tour Guiding
Here are three essential elements to consider when aiming to inject humor into your tours:
Ground Your Humor in Truth
“Most good jokes state some bitter truth,” as Larry Gelbart, a renowned scriptwriter, once said. Jokes lacking a foundation in reality often fail to resonate with the audience.
A tour guide telling a story, surrounded by a laughing audience.
Beefeater Bill exemplifies this principle when discussing the practice of displaying severed heads on spikes atop London Bridge. He explains that this served as a warning to potential traitors, humorously adding that it also functioned as an early form of bird feeder. While slightly morbid, the humor arises from the historical truth underlying the statement.
Master the Element of Surprise
Surprise is a primary driver of laughter, making it a valuable tool in crafting humorous moments. Gene Perret, a comedy writer, likened comedy to “mentally pulling the rug out from under your audience.” The key is to create a sense of expectation before subverting it with an unexpected twist.
For example, Bill uses misdirection when he asks, “Would you like to hear about a bad execution or a really bad execution?” This elicits laughter because the audience anticipates a choice between good and bad options, rather than two degrees of undesirable outcomes.
Embrace Exaggeration and Absurdity
Exaggeration and absurdity are powerful ingredients in generating humor. Beefeater Bill’s entire persona is built on a foundation of absurdity. His character, a stern military figure delivering a tour, is inherently comical. He playfully berates the tour participants as if they were new army recruits, defying the conventional customer service expectations of a tour guide. This unexpected approach contributes significantly to his comedic effect.
Another example of his absurd humor surfaces when he jokes about the challenges of finding a partner while living at the Tower of London. This type of self-deprecating humor, though potentially unconventional for a tour guide, works because he is able to laugh at himself, adding to the overall entertainment.
Risks and Rewards of Humor
Incorporating humor into your tours inevitably involves a degree of risk. Playing it safe by avoiding jokes altogether eliminates the possibility of causing offense, but it can also result in a less engaging experience.
Taking the risk is often worthwhile. Through trial and error, you’ll identify the jokes that consistently resonate with your audience and learn which ones fall flat. While occasional missteps are inevitable, the overall result will be a more captivating and memorable tour, tailored to your unique comedic style.
Find Your Funny
The process of developing your comedic style as a tour guide is a journey of discovery. Explore different approaches, experiment with various types of humor, and pay close attention to audience reactions. Over time, you’ll refine your technique and create a humorous presentation that is authentic, engaging, and uniquely your own.
Ultimately, the goal is to create a more engaging and memorable experience for your audience.
As Bernard Sahlins famously said, “Being funny is mostly telling the truth about things.”
What humorous stories or observations have you found to be effective on your tours? What methods do you use to craft your jokes, and what has proven to be most successful?
