Frequently Asked Questions

Absolutely!  You own everything that we write for you—whether you use it or not!  Often times, we write many, many lines that you want to use—but from a practical standpoint, you only want to work in and rehearse a few of them at a time.

Sometimes for a keynote speech, you could conceivably receive more than 100 new lines in your punchup.  But it may take you many months to eventually work in and get comfortable with the ones you decide to use.

If you’re having a punchup done for a speech that you’ll only deliver once, that challenge is not as relevant.  But, at the same time, we encourage you to keep all the lines ready at your beck and call.  You never know when you might be able to work in that “funny paragraph” from one speech into a similar speech you give at some future point.

We are creating humor that fits seamlessly into your existing speech.

They are often one-liners that are a comedic take on what you are already saying.

Or they are funny examples or metaphors that illustrate a point you’re making.

Sometimes they’re referencing something funny on the periphery of your topic.

And sometimes they’re what we like to call “a comment on the comment”—meaning that you’re doing you own funny “color commentary” on something you just said or on a slide you showed.

Often time we might be adding funny details to a story.

What we’re not giving you are jokes.  There are absolutely no “two guys walk into a bar” kind of jokes of any kind.  What we’re creating for you is observational and situational humor.  This kind of humor will give you far more success—and credibility—then using any kind of traditional jokes.

The only “joke” we might ever write would be a tongue-in-cheek joke that is specifically written for your audience—and would be postured that way.

Absolutely!  All of our humor punchups are “G” rated.  It’s easy to write humor that has bad language or features questionable topics.  It takes much more skilled writing to create humor that will be appropriate for any audience in any setting.

Funnier Speeches prides itself in only creating humor that could be delivered in the most conservative of settings.

That being said, we occasionally will think of a line that might be considered “PG.”  If we include that line, we will always give you a warning in the script that we think the line is very funny—but there are some that might think it to be slightly inappropriate.  Then it becomes your choice whether to use it or not.

We always advise speakers “When in doubt, leave it out.”  So if you’re at all worried that any particular line might be perceived as offensive—even if it’s not one we labeled as “PG”—then you might be better served in not using it.

Humor is incredibly subjective. That’s why we write much more humor than we think you’ll need or want. It is perfectly normal for you to dislike some of the humor we create for you. Very few clients like everything that we write for them, but they are still thrilled with the results.

But when you hire Funnier Speeches, you are accepting the fact that there is a slight risk that you may not like anything that we write for you. You also understand that even in those rare instances, the agreed-upon fees for our services are due and non-refundable.

Fortunately, our track record speaks for itself. Most of our work comes from word-of-mouth and referrals. Typically our customers are incredibly happy with the results of their punchup. (Click HERE for Raving Fans.) We continue to get great feedback for the humor we create, and many of our clients are repeat customers.

When a customer comes to us with a large project—and we haven’t worked together before—we often recommend that you start with just a small piece of your overall presentation. Maybe just the opening. Or maybe just one story. That way, you can tell whether our sense of humor is a good fit for what you’re looking for—without making a much larger investment.

Almost all clients who start with a small portion of their overall presentation end up contracting for the entire project. Once they see the customized humor that was created for their ‘test drive’ piece of the speech, they’re hooked!

Every project is priced differently. Once we see your speech or project we can get you a price quickly.  Click Here for more details on our “How It Works” page.  (“Step 3” specifically discusses pricing.)   Please know that the minimum price for any punchup is $400.

Sometimes it’s just as difficult to come up with one or two appropriate funny lines for a really short speech—that will work just perfectly—as it is to create humor for a much longer speech.

Even for a small project, we still have to find out all the particulars for the speech—the who, what, where, when, why, etc.   And we have to ramp up for the writing session, which involves mental preparation and focus—even for a short assignment.

The good news is that for repeat customers—when we’re working with variations on existing projects we’ve done—we can often reduce the $400 fee if you just need a specific new line for an event.

Unfortunately, no.  That’s just not what we do.  Our service was designed to write highly customized, highly relevant, highly appropriate humor specifically tailored to be inserted into your specific speech.

The internet is jam-packed with joke books for speakers, stock jokes, stock lines for special occasions, pre-written funny speeches, etc.   But they’re generic, at best.  And, at worst, everyone has already heard them.

At Funnier Speeches, our mantra has always been: “The More Specific The Humor, The More Terrific The Humor.”   Every single piece of humor that we create for you will reflect that way of thinking.  And when you use that kind of customized humor in your speeches, you will get much bigger, longer, and appreciative laughs than you will ever get with “stock jokes.”

The short answer is “yes.”  The longer answer is that that’s not really our specialty.  We excel at adding humor to existing speeches.

Keep in mind, the speech you submit to us doesn’t have to be polished.  It can be a rough draft.  It can be an extensive outline.  It can be very detailed bullet points.  But we do need some kind of framework and idea of what you want the speech to be about.

However, if you want us to write the speech from scratch, we can do it—but it’s a much more expensive venture.  The minimum price is $1,500, even for the shortest speech.  A keynote speech could be upwards of $10,000.  If that’s still something you’d like to do, we’re happy to help.  Contact us directly and we can get you a price.

Yes! Every punchup client gets a free 30-minute phone consultation after you’ve received the finished script. You can use your phone time to ask questions about the new material, or the delivery, or anything else you want to know that will help make your speech a success.

If you’d like to continue working together beyond the first half hour, David Glickman is also available for hire as an Executive Humor Coach.

Yes!—kind of.  We can create the concept of what will go on the funny slides.  Whether it’s funny words, or a funny picture, or some other form of humor, we can come up with the content that will help you add some funny slides to your existing slides.

However, we don’t do the actual design of the slide.   You will need to do that yourself, or outsource it to a graphic designer.  If you’d like, we can outsource it to our graphic designer and get you pricing for that.  But the actual design of the slides is not included as part of the punchup.

Yes!  We’re often asked to punch up things like blog posts, articles, video scripts, even entire books.  Again, our specialty is punching up live speeches—that’s our core business.  But we can bring lots of laughs to other types of projects, too.

There is a wonderful transcription service available called Rev.com.  Rev can take any audio or video file and transcribe it to a Word document.  They only charge $1 per minute of audio/video.  So a one-hour keynote will cost you $60 to have transcribed—and you’ll have it back in less than a day.

If you don’t want to be bothered dealing with Rev yourself, we can work with them directly to have your AV file transcribed.  There is an additional $100 fee for having us handle that for you.

We can usually review your speech and get you a price in 24-48 hours.

We try to turn around most small projects in 2-3 days.  Larger projects are usually completed within 7-10 days.

Sometimes a delivery date could be two weeks or more.  And other times we can turn around a project the same day.  When we give you your pricing, we will also give you the firm delivery date for your project.

Many clients come to us with very short deadlines.  Most of the time we can move some things around and make your deadline.  We will always try our absolute best to accommodate a very short lead time.

But just to manage expectations, there are some times when we just have too many other previous commitments and cannot do your punchup quickly.   We will always let you know that information immediately—and are happy to provide you with names of some of our other humor colleagues who might be able to do the project more rapidly.

Click Here for a more detailed explanation of “How It Works.”  The simple version is this:

You send us the speech in a Word document.

We send you a price.

If you approve the price, we send you a PayPal invoice for a 50% deposit.  (Or the full amount if it’s our minimum $400 fee.)

Once your deposit is paid, your project goes into the queue and will be completed by the date that we guaranteed in the price quote.

When we do a punchup, we are adding to your speech—and rarely deleting anything.  We are typically not editing your speech at all—just inserting humor into your existing script.  The only reason we might remove a line is if it is going to prevent a new laugh line from working.

The net result of that is that the speech becomes longer.  Sometimes much longer!  Chances are you’re not going to use all the material that we wrote for you.  But even if you were only to use 25% of the new content, it’s still going to make the speech longer than your original version.  So if you are on a strict timeline for how long your speech can be, that will now require you to edit out some of your original content—or your speech will run long.

We think this is a good problem to have!  You can now remove content that is likely unnecessary and replace it with content that is going to get you big laughs.

The other downside is that many clients become “addicted” to the laughs.  And they can never deliver another speech again without having the material punched up with humor.  (Just to clarify, this is a downside for the client’s bank account, not for us!)

Seriously, once you’ve experienced the power of getting an audience to laugh at your presentation, it’s difficult to ever go back to delivering a speech without humor.

Again, we think this is a good problem to have!  If you’re being asked to make lots of speeches, then you are building a reputation as someone who everyone wants to listen to.  The more opportunities you have to speak in public, the more you will find yourself being positioned for  success in every aspect of your life.

People who deliver Funnier Speeches are seen as charismatic, credible, knowledgeable, and respected.

Absolutely!  And it’s arguably your best tool to cut through the added distractions your audience is facing while you’re presenting.  Once the audience starts hearing some funny lines, they start to tune in.  And because so few presenters use humor in Virtual programs, your laugh lines become a magnet for the audience to focus on what’s being said.  Your humor is even more appreciated than it might be in an In Person setting, because most Virtual programs are lacking any real entertainment value.

The short answer is “you don’t.”  If you can’t hear anyone–and often can’t see anyone–it can be scary to even attempt humor.  But if you’ve made the investment in a professional humor punchup, you’ve already shown a commitment to presenting the best possible program.  Now you have to make a commitment to trust the process.  Regardless of whether you’re presenting In Person or Virtually, we always advise you to only use the lines from the punchup that YOU think are funny.  If YOU think they are funny, then you need to deliver them with absolute confidence that your audience will find them funny, too.  And that is especially true for Virtual programs.  Even though you can’t hear the laughter, you are likely to “hear” great feedback afterwards on “how funny you were.”  Trust the process.

Yes, we certainly can!   We have helped numerous clients deliver wedding speeches/toasts that were both hilarious and touching.  Like we’ve mentioned, our minimum price for any project is $400, just so that you can manage expectations.

We know that $400 may seem like a high price to punch up a short wedding speech.  But not only does your speech have to be great in the moment—but it has to live on in the video footage the wedding videographer (and scores of cell phones) will capture for perpetuity.  Don’t risk be boring—have your wedding speech punched up and be the hit of the wedding!

(Keep in mind, the $400 pricing is based on you being able to give us at least a rough draft or outline of the wedding speech.  If we have to create the entire wedding speech from scratch, it will be considerably more.  So get us some bullet points or a first draft—you’ll save a lot of money!)