Seeing, hearing, laughing, and learning from the best humorous speakers in our Area was the pleasure experienced by all those attending the Area E4 Humorous Speech contest this Wednesday.

What did we see? Four of our Area E4’s best and funniest Toastmasters:

  • Raymond Kemp – 5 Crowns
  • Urwashi Singh – Toast Health
  • Christy Richards – Toast Health
  • Zaine Mitchell – Terrace@12

What did we hear? A variety of funny, witty, and heartwarming stories and verse.

What did we learn? How to be frugal, what it takes to be a “secret” superhero, surviving travel with a teenage son, and how to work, play, and socialise.

By the end, we also learnt who out of the four contestants would be going forward to represent our area “E4” at the division contest.


Raymond Kemp, Frugal to a Fault

With promises of “Fearless frugality,” and to take us through 3 areas of savings, we embarked with Raymond as he set off stentoriously to begin his strongly structured humorous tale.

As his tale, of “Normal” activities for people, savings we laughed at the bizarreness and extreme nature of his “Normal” actions, such as e-mailing his wife her yearly coffee expenses (and still remain married), his “Normal” savings with morning teas of forgetting to bring his share, and stuffing himself to save the cost of buying his own lunch and even taking the leftovers home to share with his wife instead of a lovingly cooked evening meal.

His last “Normal” actions were unlocked by putting off car repairs, after all, Raymond’s a professional “pecunious penny pincher” going 2 yrs without being able to open the boot along with dodgy door locks. When the car key finally fatigued and broke in two, Raymond being “Normal” spent hours reverse engineering the locks to fit replacement barrels from Amazon to save as much as $400, for which he received an expressive eye-rolling response from his wife.


Christy Richards, The Antics of Cats

Started on the “frightening frolics of fearless felines”, and then abruptly stopped and slyly revealed to us that she has “got a secret”- a special power, to erase our memory, as she is also a secret superhero!

Super structuring to her speech was then applied by her in telling us she was going to answer 5 questions that she gets most commonly asked about being a superhero.

 

  1. Outfit?
  2. How do you get about?
  3. Whats the lifestyle like?
  4. How did you become a Superhero?
  5. Do you have a sidekick?

The funny thing is after she wiped our memory at the end, I can’t remember the answers!

Good thing I took notes, so

  1. I know that the mask does not go with her glasses, high heels don’t go with the running, the cape was too much of a flap, and as to wearing underwear on the outside, Christy is “just not that sort of girl”.
  2. Her transport is not an invisible plane, the bat car is more of a Corrolla and as to a secret hideout, she invisibly nestles nondescriptly in a secret secluded area of suburbia.
  3. As to lifestyle, she admits is a big balancing act between the superhero stuff and work.
  4.  Christy became a superhero twice, first 17 years ago and then again 4 years later!
  5. She does have a sidekick, Aaron.

There was one question left unanswered, what type of superhero is Christy?

Super Mum


Urwashi Singh, A Trip to the UK

Do you like travelling? Urwashi does but she told us she has lost her enthusiasm! Why? Her teenage son, who testified that she ruined his school holiday of planned long sleep-ins doing nothing, by Urwashi booking a holiday to the UK.

We were then entertained with an endearing and detailed cameo of Urwashi and her heartfelt headaches and extended exacerbations in the plane before take-off – when the wait, wait, wait ended with a not wanted announcement that the planes airconditioning was having trouble but to Urwashi that was nothing to the troubles of the moans and text messages from her travel resenting son.

In the end with the “God, I want this to be heard” announcement came and the plane proceeding to take off.

I really could personally resonate with the story for my wife gets just as exacerbated sometimes with our son too and similarly, they both were flying off for the school holidays to Japan, however, my wife’s travel was stress-free because she flew by herself the day before Urwashi’s speech and my son followed the day after it!


Zaine Mitchell, Work, Play, & Socialising

Zaine had worked with his words beforehand, where he played with them plenty to get them right, and now soundly socialised them with us, repeating this formula of lines to create repeated rhythm in rhyme:

“Work, play, and socialise, if you keep to this formula, life can be amazing”.

And amazing was Zaine’s rhyming’s, as he worked wondrously hard to be a bard. To rhythm his words and keep on time, is very fine. Especially when you’re being funny, whilst talking on an empty tummy. Yet there was plenty of honey, in the words and some talk of money, spent on cups of tea, as Zaine’s words were of a higher degree, you really do have to agree. As you can read I was greatly inspired, by Zaine who never tired. With his words that he spoke off pat to which I lift off my hat. And that is that.

“Work, play, and socialise, if you keep to this formula, life can be amazing”.


And the winners:

  • 1st Raymond Kemp – 5 Crowns
  • 2nd Christy Richards – Toast Health

Peter Scholtens (contest chair), Raymond Kemp (1st), Christy Richards (2nd)