Bruno's Column: Creating Original Humour for your Wedding Speeches [7] Lateral Thinking

Hi folks. This month we're going to investigate lateral thinking as a way of inventing humour when writing or adapting your wedding speech.

The term "lateral thinking" was coined in the seventies by Edward de Bono. He wrote a lot of books on creative thinking and devised a great many tools to help generate original thought. One of these was the simple trick of looking at "opposites", and it is this which I am going to share with you in this article. It is well worth remembering not just for creating humour but for any situation where you require original thinking, eg problem solving, coming up with an invention, a business idea or lyrics for a song. I have used it for all of these purposes.

So much for the preamble - let's get down to the nitty gritty. Let's start the process of generating humour ideas using lateral thinking - thinking "sideways" rather than the usual and obvious frontal assault.

STEP 1

Choose a subject. I recommend that you work through these steps for each main subject in your speech. I' m going to illustrate the method using the theme of football - but you can use any theme at all.

STEP 2

Brainstorm everything that you know about the subject:

FOOTBALL:

• ball
  • round
  • leather
• premier league
• 3 other leagues
• goalkeeper
  • tall
• first half
• grass
• stadium
• supporters
• boots
• studs
• cup

Obviously there is a lot more that you could put down here, but I think that' s probably enough for illustrative purposes.

STEP 3

• ball
  • round ..... ..... ..... ..... ..... square
  • leather ..... ..... ..... ..... ..... made of soap => imperial leather
• premier league ..... ..... ..... ..... ..... bottom league
• 3 other leagues ..... ..... ..... ..... ..... 20,000 leagues
• goalkeeper
• tall ..... ..... ..... ..... ..... short goalie

• first half ..... ..... ..... ..... ..... five pints
• grass ..... ..... ..... ..... ..... astroturf
• stadium ..... ..... ..... ..... ..... amphitheatre
• supporters ..... ..... ..... ..... ..... under-miners
• boots ..... ..... ..... ..... ..... wellies, flippers
• studs ..... ..... ..... ..... ..... stilts
• cup ..... ..... ..... ..... ..... saucer

STEP 4

Look at the opposites with an open mind for germs of humour - explore the possibilities:

• Square ball: at least it wouldn' t move when you were taking a penalty
• Ball made of soap: in rain it would produce suds and get steadily smaller
• 20,000 leagues under the sea: underwater football - I' m sure we' ve all seen many a game played under slanting rain
• Short goalie: how about Ronnie Corbett?
• First half: pint, cocktail, short
• Astroturf: Do you prefer grass or Astroturf? I don' t know, I' ve never smoked Astroturf (with due credit to John Sullivan)
• Amphitheatre: Throw the players to the lions? Sometimes they deserve it
• Underminers: a race of goblins burrowing under the ground sowing discontent
• Wellies, flippers: ideal wear for underwater football
• Stilts instead of studs: useful to make Ronnie tall enough to be an ace keeper
• Saucer: Where do you find a cup and saucer? In a canteen

STEP 5

Now we need to turn as many of these ideas into jokes as possible. A lot of them have humour in them but are difficult to create a punchline for, eg the underminers, the soap-ball etc. This is just the way it goes - you have to churn out a lot of ideas to get the few that will work. Incidentally, Eddie Izzard generally creates two hours of guff in order to find two minutes worth of useful material. But I urge you to persist - your speech can benefit immensely from that two minutes.

Bearing in mind the advice given earlier in my columns about humour which is NOT appripriate on the wedding day, we can now attempt to create jokes.

From the above, in addition to the Only Fools... joke, two possibles stand out for me (you might see others): " first half" and " saucer" . What can we make of these? I like:

• He' s still interested in football, but he gets tired after the first half, so he goes on shorts instead.
• As for "saucer" and "canteen," how about this:
  There was a fire at the ground. The manager panicked. "The cup, the cup!" he cried."Don't worry", said the fire-chief, " it didn't even get as far as the canteen."

I hope that you can see the potential of this way of thinking, tying it in with the joke creation methods outlined earlier, and I hope you manage to use it to great effect on the big day.

Good luck!