How To Introduce An Academic Speaker
This installment of the Association of Imaginary School’s series for Fred’s University, hosted at the annual Fred Med Drug Sales Rep’s Sales Conference in the Poxycodone Park Opioid Death Memorial Interminable Lecture Hall, is sponsored by the Sicker Family Trust.
5 Tips For Success In Introducing A Speaker
- Introducing a speaker is an opportunity to promote yourself. Relate everything you say about the speaker to your own career and Patreon channel. Take credit in a falsely self-effacing way for the success of the speaker, ideally locking the speaker into uncomfortable eye contact with you so as to model the attention you want given yourself.
- Your intro should include a joke no one will laugh at. Ideally, this should be a supposedly spontaneous witticism that you carefully plan in advance. Do not mistake the fact that no one listens to your joke as indifference: watching you fail to be funny is part of the expected entertainment. Failure to be un-funny is an insult to your audience. Sort of like throwing up, you will feel better after this part is over.
- If you are forced to give a capsule resume of the speaker from Boy Scouts Order of the Arrow through Coordinator of Bagel Fridays, race through it with a knowing, humorous expression. The alternative, which is to read the resume as if it were a TS Eliot poem, complete with long meaningful pauses between lines, should be reserved for situations where the speaker has much more prestige than you and your only hope at self-promotion is to bask in their reflected glory. Later use carefully chosen hashtags to link yourself to the speaker’s bio.
- Speak directly to the camera broadcasting the event and saving it to the archives, not to the sparse audience crouched in folding chairs tented over half-empty Starbucks cups sure to fall over by intermission. The people in the room with you are all thinking about when they can politely check their phones or get up to pee. Your real audience is the people who will Google your talk in ten years and laugh at your lapels.
- If you are introducing a speaker who is introducing another speaker in an endurance relay race of academic platitudes…know that the audience is filled with hatred for you as they are forced to wait for the real speaker. They are picturing ways to murder you and focusing indecently on the capillary action of your underarm sweat stains. They are wishing they could pull out that Starbucks cup and pee in it right now while you are talking. Imagine yourself in a puddle of pee and any stage fright you have should dissolve and your lifelong fear of public speaking should leak out of you long before intermission.
Comments Closed on How To Introduce A Speaker
**Starred Comments**
Dean Of Deans Of Students, Fred’s University
My own work on this subject highlights the importance of speaker introductions in promoting institutions and organizations. The introduction is an opportunity for a school or department to get extra publicity and drive traffic to their social media. That is why at Fred Med we have adopted the technique used at celebrity galas of having a backdrop with our logo and social media accounts prominently displayed when we force speakers to get pictures with us.
DwayneG
The revolting display of social hierarchy in the relay of introductions at an academic talk, with one speaker sucking up to the next speaker while also pimping themselves out, is why there are so few people in your audiences in real life. Give me a cup of pee any day.
EndAcademiaNow23
How about an austerity move where we make cutbacks on the number of allowed introductions at any public lecture? Just like you pump your own gas now, how about you introduce yourself? Working from home over the pandemic you realize how much of your life is wasted on rituals designed to reinforce oppressive institutional structures and to police who has a voice in our society. Every man for himself.
OrderOfTheArrow
I really appreciate this tutorial on how to introduce a speaker. I have the privilege of being asked to introduce next month’s speaker at the Poxycodone Park Symposium, the esteemed Dr. Littlepill, and this excellent overview from the Association of Imaginary Schools will make it possible for me to put Dr. Littlepill in the best possible light. As a lifelong friend and mentor, the good doctor has been an invaluable collaborator and contributor to our culture of inclusion at Fred Med. His work on stress incontinence might be particularly useful to some of the participants in today’s discussion as well. You can find more information on his work on my website at this link.
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