It’s the commencement address season, and the advice of the age is:  be yourself.  This advice has a variety of forms, some interesting, some less so.  Sometimes it comes under the rubric of ‘following your bliss’ and other times it’s more about authenticity.  But everyone is agreed that being yourself is important. 

How do you make that new and compelling?  If you’re Ellen Degeneres, you make it funny: http://tinyurl.com/r8vavt.  The speech is a great reminder that humor always makes its own rules.  In other words, if you’re funny, you can get away with just about everything else. 

So think of this as Ellen’s Three Rules for a Successful Commencement Speech. 

1.  Be funny.   Humor is so rare at the podium, that a funny speech will fall like manna from heaven.  But humor is hard to do, and hard to do well.  You run the risk of offending some portion of your audience.  So be warned.  Humor takes guts.

2.  Be real; tell real stories.  Ellen leavens her humor with some very serious stories from her own life and her struggle to find her niche.  Authenticity is essential, especially if you’re going to be funny, because we only trust people who show us their hearts.

3.  Be brief.  Ellen’s speech lasts less than 10 minutes.  It’s hard to imagine why you would want to go longer.  Attention spans used to be 21 minutes; recently some have argued that they are shrinking – to 10 minutes.  If that’s true, then it’s the new right length for commencement speeches.   

Comments

[Kare anderson]

Re Ellen's video, fyi: This video has been removed due to terms of use violation.