An article on public speaking and humor by John Cantu
I want
to introduce you to one of Three Musketeers of Speech Writing... John Cantu is a San Francisco comedy legend, owner and producer
of the legendary Holy City Zoo, who helps you laugh all the
way to the bank. He's written material for Joan Rivers, Phyllis
Diller, and the Smothers Brothers, many professional speakers
and corporate executives.
Enjoy,
Patricia Fripp
The
Internet is a great resource for information. There are vast quantities
of information on everything from aardvarks to zoology. You'd
also think it would also be an excellent resource for humor.
Let me caution you. You must be careful using the web as a
source of humor. There are hundreds of thousands of amateurs
hosting web pages, home pages, creating ezines, and sending
and forwarding a ton of humor. But because most of them are
amateurs, they are not aware that humor is intellectual property.
They unknowing will post anything that they find funny. And
that might be something they scanned from a copyrighted book,
or material they transcribed from some comedian's performance,
or from some humorist's presentation.
It might
be quotes from a comedy tape, a presentation from Comedy Central,
or just a few favorite lines they recall from the last comedy
show they attended. I have received jokes from friends and
colleagues and I have sometimes subscribed to humor ezines
and I frequently recognized material that belongs to certain
performers but were not credited to them.
You
may have heard about the hoax that was perpetrated some months
back. A university commencement address was posted and attributed
to Kurt Vonnegut. At a meeting of my local NSA chapter I heard
a featured speaker quoting from that talk as his own material.
A buzz went up around the luncheon table as several other
attendees recognized it. Whatever the source, humor is the
property of the person who originated it and you cannot use
it without their expressed permission. If you want legally
safe sources for humor, buy joke books or humor books that
are explicitly designed to provide you with material you can
use without attribution. When using the web for humor, make
sure you know the source of the humor AND that is okay to
reproduce the humor.
(311
words)
|
