Training A Clown

“Laughter is the shortest distance between two people.” – Victor Borge

I attended this off-site training last Wednesday. One of the topics was humor for the Trainer. It looked and sounded promising and since as an intro the speaker introduced himself as the top 5 speaker in the recent Phil Call Center Convention, I happily trotted along even knowing that 5 hours out of my day would set me back about 10 hours with my Excel duties. We know how discriminating Trainers are. We’re the hardest and most critical audience after all. (The arrogance of a Trainer thinks we can always do a better job than the one in the current spotlight. And it’s mostly true. Hehe.)

Well, he started out with a Zip-Zap-Zung (whatever) activity. Unfortunately the venue where the training was held did not cooperate with him. Not to say that we just went through an ice-breaker activity that the facilitator was the bitchiest gay I’ve encountered in a long time and not to say very ineffective: he left us to process the why’s of the ice-breakers. So, from the ZZZ activity he started every paragraph with how the venue was not a good arena for training like his. And unfortunately his PowerPoint prezo went haywire and his hand-outs were not printed. (Typical Trainer dilemmas) Suffice to say he bombed.

I was itching for an IOF. (Instructor Observation Form for you)

The topic was not covered in any cohesive manner. I think he let the venue throw him off and he couldn’t get his groove back after that. So the next 45 minutes didn’t fare well. He had some basic, useful tips on how to use humor in trainings but the samples that he had were horrendous. For what was supposed to be catch-phrases, it really stank. He blamed our non-laughter with us reading the samples off the projector in advance so the “supposed” desired effect was not effected. Yeah, right. Personally, I always use humor to promote learning. (Or to wake up a graveyard class) Humor makes a topic memorable. (So does disgust, but I digress) but I always thought that humor can extend to all situations and that like empathy statements, should always be tailored fit to the situation. (Such a Trainer!)

In conclusion, I think he would have done better if he just winged (?) it and shot from the hip (his statement) and used the situation he was in as fodder for his jokes. The audience was too diverse and you can’t assume that everyone will “get” you.

Oh well, we can’t all be comedians.