Who wants to deliver a humorous speech? That was the question of the evening at the West Herts Speaker Club meeting on 13th September, posed by club member Richard, who’s admirably volunteered himself to be contest chair at our upcoming humorous speech contest on the 27th September. We Toastmasters love a contest and the humorous speech is a particularly enjoyable one, by its very nature, it’s one that guarantees much laughter.
Round the world, Toastmasters clubs are holding humorous speech contests, competing at division area, regional, national and international levels. Well done to everyone who put themselves forward, but especially to Ryan and Andrew, who have entered both the prepared speech contest as well as the impromptu speaking contest. We think these two have a bit of rivalry going on…
It was business as usual otherwise for our club meeting, brilliantly led by our toastmaster of the night Anthony Boboe. We had three guests join us for the evening, keen to know what West Herts Speaker Club is all about. One has indicated she’s really keen to sign up to be a member, another loved how more relaxed we were compared with her former club in Hungary, and the other didn’t reappear after the short break – hey you can’t win them all!
We also welcomed back Patrick, who was visiting us from Toastmasters in Luton. He smashed his impromptu question, posed by our topics master Paul M, and won the coveted best table topics speaker award for the night.
Our prepared speeches were delivered firstly by Aga, who was keen to dispel the myth that we should be eating five portions of fruit and veg a day; then Ryan who shared his top tips on how to influence people and not be held back by worries; finishing with Andrew, whose excellent speech on leadership blew everyone’s mind, not least because he over-ran the maximum allocated speech time by four minutes – you can’t be doing that during the contest next week Andrew! All were inspired speeches, but it was Ryan that won the coveted Best Speaker award this week.
When it came to evaluations, the quality of the evaluators was so high that we simply couldn’t pick one winner. Well done to Richard and Paul G, who shared the prize for the night.
Now try as we might to be a very serious club that observes all the rules of Toastmasters international, we do have our moments and Wednesday night was no exception. Shout out to Spencer – our grammarian, who forgot he was supposed to provide a ‘word of the day’, to Jill – our timekeeper who repeatedly forgot to write down the times (she can’t do that during a contest) and to Phil – our general evaluator who hilariously failed to notice that he’d been fed the word ‘procreate’ as one of the 4 P’s Paul G had used in his evaluation of Aga’s speech. Funny times.
We look forward to our humorous speech contest on the 27th and encourage as many guests as possible to attend.