"Two-thirds of attempts at humor garnered either polite chuckles or straight-up dead silence, and only 9% landed well enough to get most of the room laughing."
"The biggest laughs... came from technical snafus, like slides malfunctioning and mics cutting out. Nothing brings an audience together faster than watching something go wrong for someone else."
"Despite the incredible wealth of interesting content at conferences, it can be hard to stay engaged. And by engaged, I mean awake."
A survey of over 500 science conference presentations revealed that humor is often ineffective, with two-thirds of attempts resulting in either polite chuckles or silence. Only 9% of humor attempts succeeded in eliciting laughter from the audience. Technical mishaps, such as malfunctioning slides, generated the most laughter. Approximately 40% of presentations avoided humor altogether, which may lead to less engaging and memorable talks, as noted by a physician-scientist who emphasized the challenge of maintaining audience engagement during conferences.
Read at TechCrunch
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]