This weekend I opened my sermon with a joke. I thought it would bring laughter at the beginning of what I knew was going to be a heavy sermon.
However, the joke didn’t work well at all. The reason being, I forgot a key line in the joke. It was a simple line that would have made the joke actually funny. Here is the joke below, with the line in missed in red:
“You,” said the doctor to the patient, “are in terrible shape. You’ve got to do something about it. First, tell your wife to cook more nutritious meals. Stop working like a dog. Also, inform your wife you’re going to make a budget, and she has to stick to it. And have her keep the kids off your back so you can relax. Unless there are some changes like that in your life, you’ll probably be dead in a month.”
“Doc,” the patient said, “this would sound more official coming from you. Could you please call my wife and give her those instructions?”
When the fellow got home, his wife rushed to him. “I talked to your doctor,” she wailed. “Poor man, you’ve only got thirty days to live.”
You can watch the opening to my sermon (and the belly-flop) by clicking here.
I learned some things from this slightly humiliating experience:
1. When you use a joke, rehearse it thoroughly and even practice it in front of people. The more you practice it with people, you will learn where they laugh and how to place your strategic pauses.
2. Highlight the key lines in your notes. I wasn’t even looking at my notes when I told this, but I am sure if I would have highlighted the key lines in my notes, it would have burned them into my memory.
3. If the joke fails, become the joke yourself. The only saving grace to a joke gone bad is when you can laugh at yourself. Help the audience release their feelings of “Poor guy… he just killed that” by a good belly-laugh with you.
I firmly believe in the power of laughter in sermons. I believe laugher is a window to the soul that allows for deep truth then to be spoken. There are many great preachers, like Chuck Swindoll, Francis Chan or Reggie Dabbs, who have mastered the art of laughter in sermons. I hope to follow in their footsteps… but I obviously have a long way to go.
