He Uses Punch Lines to Punch Up Speeches

Douglas A. Daniel, 71, “an old song-and-dance man” from vaudeville days, brought some of the gentle humor of that era to Cypress College Tuesday.

He began with a bit of biography: “I was born at a very early age.”

The students chuckled.

Nominally, it was a workshop, called “Injecting Humor Into Your Presentation,” dealing with how to leaven heavy talks with the yeast of laughter. But Daniel, a Stanton resident who runs a speakers’ bureau in Anaheim, also gave the young audience an insight into the kind of jokes and staccato talk that wowed vaudeville audiences during World War I and the Roaring ‘20s.

Johnny Carson he wasn’t. There were no topical references to any political leaders or current movie stars. Neither were there any hints of sex. “You should leave blue jokes to someone else,” he advised the students.

His humor consisted of short anecdotes delivered deadpan. For instance:

“They asked this kid how he was getting along with his stepfather. ‘Oh, fine,’ says the kid. ‘For my exercise, he rows me out to the middle of the lake every day, drops me off, and I swim back to the shore.’

“ ‘Isn’t that a hard swim for such a little lad?’ ‘Naw,’ said the boy. ‘The only hard part is climbing out of the sack he puts me in.’ ”

Daniel’s jokes typically produced grins and chuckles--not whoops of laughter. For a generation raised on TV comedy, the quips of the former vaudevillian--”I was with the old Keith Orpheum Circuit, and that was the best”--were charmingly anachronistic.

But while his jokes may have been outdated, Daniel had points about humor that remain timeless. For instance: “The great bulk of humor comes from distortion,” he said. “Humor must be true to life, it must be plausible . . . . Humor must reflect the moods and mores of man.”

And Daniel reflected on the shifting patterns of joke-telling. “Humor changes and will continue to change,” he said. “Humor is flexible.”

Daniel gave tips on how to tell a funny story: “Take your time. And don’t swallow the punch line.”

World Likes to Smile

Above all, he said, remember that the world likes to smile. The grandest of speeches, he said, can be made even better with just a dash of humor.

Among the non-students seated in Daniel’s audience was Jack Scott, the president of Cypress College.

Scott chuckled during the hourlong lecture, and he acknowledged that humor helps him in his many speaking chores.

Asked for a quick joke, Scott responded with this:

“The Internal Revenue Service sent a form to this company. The form said, ‘Please list all your employees, broken down by sex.’ The employer wrote on the form: ‘None. Their problem is alcoholism.’ ”

The class ended, as it began, with smiles.

Daniel, the happy minstrel man, had a final word of advice: Don’t worry if some jokes fall flat.

“When you bomb out,” he said, “don’t let on. You just keep going.”