The quote is from Rozi Vaczi, founder of Matyodesign, and comes from the opening of her speech at the TEDx🔴 event of Budapest Metropolitan University. It is a great example of incongruity humor theory.
My mother met my father at the after-party of her wedding.
[Short silence]
[Long laughter]
With the opening, Rozi set a positive atmosphere for her speech.
Incongruity theory helps us understand why this worked so well. By the end of the first half of the sentence, I anticipated a usual story of how the speaker’s parents met. By the end of the sentence, I felt something was wrong. For a split second, I couldn’t figure out what. When I understood it, I started laughing. And I wasn’t alone either. The delivery made the experience even more enjoyable. Rozi kept a long enough pause to let the audience understand the full meaning of the sentence. The difference between expectation and reality made this opening so effective. This difference is what incongruity theory is about.
Throughout her speech, Rozi continued to use humorous elements as well as other rhetorical devices and shared with the audience the story behind Matyodesign. I am happy I had a chance to experience the speech in person.
With this post, I am closing my post-miniseries showing examples of humorous elements of speeches from TEDxMETU. I hope you found them useful.
All speeches will be available online (with English subtitles). Watch them and learn from them! Keep in mind, humor tools can be learned!
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Note on translation:
Translating certain types of humor is hard. The structure of different languages requires different word orders, which may influence the perceived funniness of a sentence. The reason is that in the case of humor, it’s best to keep the punchline for the end. In the original text, the punchline was the person Rozi’s mother met at the party (her father). A more literal translation that also keeps the punchline for the end would be:
“It was at the after-party of her wedding that my mother met my father.”
However, with humor, another aspect to consider is length. Usually, the shorter you say something, the funnier it will be. For this reason, and because I thought it would sound more natural, I decided to go with the translation and explanation you can see at the beginning of the post. It changes the structure, but keeps the spirit of the original.
“My mother met my father at the after-party of her wedding.”
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You want to know how it all went in Hungarian? The Hungarian version of the post is here.