From Chendil Kumar's blog: Spontaneous Speech Openers

CK Online - Communicate to Connect !

Spontaneous Speech Openers

A celebrity speaker,wading his way through entangled wires to the podium,slips and falls flat. Lying down,he speaks through his lapel microphone "for the first time in my 20 years of speaking career, I've reached the level of my audience !"

Another speaker who tripped and fell said " I am now ready to take questions from the floor !"


I am not sure what their topics were but I feel the audience would have lapped up anything they said after the remarkable way in which they opened their speeches by converting their problems into opportunities...

I find this to be the toughest form of humor- recovering from a crisis/setback. Malcolm Kushner uses the term "reframing" to describe such quick thinking. While lesser speakers would have floundered at the fall, both the speakers instantly reframed their misery into a mirthful, self deprecating dig !