Today’s Tour Guide Training? How to be a funny tour guide and how to give a funny tour.
Being funny is one of those traits that many incredible tour guides seem to share. You don’t have to be funny to be a great guide, but a well-placed joke or a good-hearted jab can really make your tour a lot more fun.
People love laughing, being surprised and hearing about absurd people and places. A great tour is ultimately a form of entertainment and it is worth it to figure out how you can incorporate humour into your experience.
Luckily, there are lots of ways to be funny, but unluckily, there is nothing less funny than someone trying too hard to tell jokes.
My strategy today is as follows:
- Check out the above video for some tips on writing jokes and creating humour on your tour.
- On YouTube I’ve found a tremendously funny English tour guide named Beefeater Bill. His tour lasts just under an hour, but is a great example of a tour guide being hilarious.
To connect with ‘Beefeater’ Bill Callaghan you can use the links below for his website and Twitter account!
http://www.beefeaterbill.com
https://twitter.com/intent/user?screen_name=BillyBeefeater
-Kelsey T
Click below to share today’s QnA tweetable:
Being funny is mostly telling the truth about things -Bernard Sahlins via @beabetterguide
Finished Watching?
In the comments let me know how you are funny on tour? What have you found is the best way to write jokes and what did you think about Beefeater Bill’s tour?
Transcript:
Hi, everyone. This is Kelsey from beabetterguide.com and welcomes to our community Q&A. Hopefully, we still got some Americans with us.
So, you’re here, probably wanting how you can be a little bit more fun on tour or incorporate some humour into tours that you give. Now, being funny is a skill that’s great to have if you’re a tour guide, but it’s really not an easy one to master.
So, here’s what I was thinking of doing today. After doing some research, I found the videos below of a complete tour, the Tower of London. The tour is given by Beefeater Bill, Bill Callaghan is the Yeoman of the Guard and gives the tour at the Tower of London.
Now, these videos went a little bit viral a few years back and collectively, they’ve earned over a million views mostly because he’s downright hilarious. He puts on this really tough military demeanour that you wouldn’t expect from a tour guide.
So, if you’re looking for a little inspiration, I would highly recommend watching these videos below. But while you’re doing it, here are three things to consider when you’re trying to be funny on tour.
“Most good jokes state some bitter truth,” said the scriptwriter, Larry Gelbart. And without some fundamental basis in truth, most jokes will tend to fall flat.
So, a great example from Beefeater Bill’s tour is when he’s talking about how executioners would mount the head, severed heads on spikes and put them on London Bridge, and this was a warning to would-be traitors and also served as a form of an early bird feeder.
This gets super gross, but it gets a chuckle from people because there is some truth to this joke.
Surprise is one of the primary reasons why people laugh and therefore, it’s one of the most successful building blocks for a good joke.
To paraphrase Gene Perret, he wrote that comedy is like mentally pulling the rug out from under your audience.
But first, you have to fool them, you have to get them to stand on the rug and if they see you getting ready to pull the rug, then they’ll just step off.
So, for example from Bill. He uses this simple misdirection when he says, “Would you like to hear about a bad execution or really bad execution?” And this gets a chuckle from people because they’re expecting him to offer better alternatives.
Another important building block for humor is an exaggeration and the absurd. The whole premise of Beefeater Bill’s tour is shtick if you will.
He’s laughably absurd. Basically that these people have come, they’ve paid good money and they want a top-quality tour guide, and he is tossing out all the normal customer service sort of things, sort of berating them as new recruits into the army.
So, that even itself is quite funny, and part of it I think is why he’s able to pull it off.
Another absurd thing that happens on the tour is at one point he starts talking about his marital status. He starts joking “Oh, how hard it is to find a lady living here in the Tower of London. I guess he lives on site.”
And this also gets big laughs from people because normally this is something that’s way out of line for a tour guide to do, but it kind of shows that he’s able to laugh at himself and is able to pull it off. Whenever you’re making jokes on a tour, you are taking a bit of a risk.
So, you could play it ultra-conservatively, not have any jokes, and make sure you don’t offend anybody. But in my opinion, this is a risk worth taking.
You’ll find the jokes that make most people laugh, you’ll learn ones that don’t work, you know, that you’re going to have to upset a few people here and there.
But in the end, that’s going to be worth it. It’s going to make for a much more interesting tour and you will find humor that’s your style.
And so, for today’s tweetable, “Being funny is mostly telling the truth about things. –Bernard Sahlins.” So share the tweetable if you’re inspired or like and share this video.
In the comments below, let me know how you are funny on tour, how do you write jokes, whether have you found a method that works, and what you think of Beefeater Bill’s funny tour below. Thanks so much for being here. I’ll see you next time.
