790 – Use these to enhance your presentations: Tom talks Caricature and Cartoons

Episode 790 – Caricature and Cartoons
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with episode 792 Screw the Commute podcast. Now this is part of a series I'm doing on presentations and speeches based on my classic book. Classic, because it's been around a long time. Wake 'em Up Business presentations. And I still use the same techniques today. So today I'm going to talk about using caricature and cartoons and how to use these in presentations, especially if you have an international audience. I mean, everybody loves cartoons and comic strips and caricature and stuff like that, but it's especially important with international audiences. I hope you didn't miss Episode 789, 788, 787 and 786. These are all on how to practice, how to keep people's attention, how to bomb proof so you never mess up at a presentation. So any time you want to get to a back episode, you go to screwthecommute.com, slash, and then the episode number just start with 786 and keep going. All right, let's see. Make sure you pick up a copy of our automation book at screwthecommute.com/automatefree and you will thank me for it because it'll save you hundreds, if not thousands of hours fighting with your computer.

[00:01:42] All right. Let's get to the main event caricature first. Now, if you take prominent features of something or somebody and highlight them and like and make them way bigger and then some features make them way smaller. This is called caricature. And they actually did some studies that found that it's easier to identify a political leader from a caricature than from a real photograph.

[00:02:12] Okay. And so this is kind of a form of exaggeration, which I'll cover in another episode one of these days on exaggeration humor. But you can use caricatures of yourself in your promotional material or in your programs or in your handouts. You know, make a little fun of yourself, show lightheartedness, and you can do the same thing to make fun of your competitors or whoever you're speaking to their competitors, and they'll love you for it, for taking the time to do that. Now you can find caricature artists for sure locally, but you don't have to. You got places like Fiverr and Upwork and picsart.com is a good one too, to do them. I mean Fiverr and Upwork, you can have custom ones made and Picsart and Canva. I mean I think you upload photos and it turns them into caricatures. So you can all you have to do is Google caricature generator and you'll find tons of places. Another one media.io and there's loads of them. But anyway, Google caricature generator and try them out. A lot of them are free so that's caricature and how to use it now cartoons. Now when I teach speakers that are speaking to many international audiences see the most universally accepted format for humor in those types of audiences are cartoons, because many of them send the message without having to understand the words or the nuances of language say.

[00:03:55] Now, there's three ways you can use cartoons. First, you can tell the audience about a cartoon that you saw. Second, you can cut the cartoon out or print it up and show it, but you got to watch for copyright infringement on that one. And third, you can make up a cartoon yourself. So here's an example like I saw this is me on stage telling you how I would say this. Hey, I saw a cartoon once where a lady was holding a gun to her purse, and the caption said, Give up the keys. And I might use that as an example of when I want to illustrate the use of humor to help ease the tension of an embarrassing situation. And I've also used the line many times when I'm with a woman who is fumbling through her purse. So it eases the tension, makes it a little fun of the situation and shows that I'm a fun guy. See? Now, when I tell an audience I saw a cartoon, it helps them paint a mental picture of what I'm describing with my words because they're not actually seeing the cartoon at that point or maybe ever, but they're painting a picture in their mind. And so describing the cartoon, it's an easy method for using cartoons without having them physically available or needing audio visual equipment to show them. One of my favorites, I'm not sure I could use this one nowadays, but I said I saw a cartoon in Playboy where Superman was in bed with a girl and the girl was all upset and crying and and.

[00:05:40] And the caption said. Uh, Superman said, I can't help it. I'm faster than a speeding bullet. So. So, anyway, I think you could paint that picture in your mind there. Right. Now showing a cartoon is a more powerful way to convey its humorous message. It's like I said, it's especially true in international audience, where the visual aspect takes on a greater significance because the words they have to translate in their mind and it may not make sense in their language, so forth. Now, if it was a very small crowd and I actually had a copyrighted cartoon, I might hold it up or pass it around because I'm not reprinting it and projecting it and all that stuff. Now, I can't say not an attorney, so do that at your own risk. But I like that method because I can control when it pops up or when it's seen by people. I mean, if I project it, if I have the permission to project it. So you've got to get permission for that. But that way, one of the ways it's better than passing it around is because when I project it. Everybody gets it at the same time, and that makes the laughter cumulative much louder. If I was passing it around person to person, they might chuckle to themselves, but the whole room wouldn't be in laughter.

[00:07:15] See, So if you can project it, that's a better way. You know, create a greater impact. In other words, now you can find cartoons all over the place, the magazines online. New York magazine was famous for cartoons. I got one out of there one time where there was a dog sitting at a computer and I was talking about fraud online or something. And and the dog was typing on the computer and his buddy is a dog. And his buddy says, Hey, you can't get on the computer. You're a dog. And the dog on the computer said, Hey, if I'm on the computer, they can't tell I'm a dog. Right? So so that was a famous one from The New Yorker. But I'm cool in telling you because I'm not recopying the thing. I'm just telling what I saw. Okay. So just start paying attention for cartoons you find and think about how you could use them. And the third way to use cartoons is to make them yourself. And when I first started teaching this subject, you could not take advantage of this method unless you hired a cartoon artist, which is still a viable method when Fiverr or Upwork. But. But it wasn't easy back then. But things are different now. I mean, I have a subscription. This is a paid subscription. I think it cost me $80 a year to clipart.com. They have over a million pieces of clip art and many of them are cartoons where I can just find one that makes sense for my group, right? A custom caption.

[00:08:53] And I have perfect rights to use it, see, so I can put it in my handouts. I can show it on the screen. Whatever I want to do with it is fine because I'm paying for the subscription. So use this or there's another place I forgot to tools.com to NY t o. L.com is another place where you can make animated cartoons and again, just Google cartoon generator. And a lot of them are just taking a photo and turning it into a cartoon, which can be a lot of fun. But if you if you want to make an actual cartoon, you got to look a little deeper to the cartoon generators. When you Google it. See, folks, audiences expect some kind of entertainment value whenever they're at a presentation. Could be a little bit could be a lot, But they expect something. And if you just get up there and just drone on with no entertainment value, they're going to think, Wow, this was a boring this I hate when this person speaks. So if you're not comfortable delivering humor, cartoons and caricature are a way to get the entertainment value in without you having to be a stand up comedian. All right. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. Hey, if you like, help with this and the million other things that you need to know to be a successful speaker and Internet marketer, check out my mentor program at greatInternetmarketingtraining.com, which includes my professional speaking mentor program.

[00:10:25] Or you can get that separately at ScrewtheCommute.com/prospeaking, so if you really want to up your game and this speaking has meant millions and millions and millions of dollars to me over many years, 3000 speeches and 12 countries. And in the last 20 years I never did a speech where I didn't pull a hundred grand. All right. So and that sounds like BS, but when you sell it to back of the room, you know, 20 people at $5,000 a piece for my, you know, mentor program, it's discounted at those kinds of events. You know, that's a hundred grand right there. I've done the highest I've done, I think with about 300 people is 250,000. But these techniques are what I use. None of it is hard, but you got to practice and know about them. So check out this whole presenter series starting at episode 786 and I'll probably do a couple more of them for you. But anyway, grab a copy of my Wake Em Up book at Screwthecommute.com/wakebook, get the digital version and download it immediately and you'll go in great depth on all these topics. All right, that's my story and I'm sticking to it. We'll catch you on the next episode. See you later.