Speech on Humour and Wisdom for Children

Very good morning to everyone present here. On this auspicious day today, I am going to speak on the topic of humour and wisdom. It is a matter of great honour for me to have been chosen to deliver the speech in front of my esteemed teachers and my loving friends and classmates.

I humbly request your attention and beg your pardon for any mistakes that will be made if at all. Please feel free to correct me wherever I am wrong. I am open to suggestions.

Before proceeding any further let me first explain to you the title of my speech that is humour and wisdom. Let’s first talk about what is humour. Humour, according to the dictionary is the quality of being amusing or comic especially as expressed in Literature or speech or just a state of mind that is good.

So, what does this mean? Humour can be both good and bad. It is after all very difficult to differentiate between the two because human is an extremely subjective topic. Good humour to one, might be bad humour to another and vice versa.

In recent days however, the quality of humour has greatly deteriorated to just making derogatory claims against individuals or simply exploiting stereotypes. Quality humour is something that not only amuses us but also open us up and makes us susceptible to, what I’m going to speak on next, that is wisdom.

So much spoken about humour now let us shift our focus to wisdom. What does the word wisdom ring in your head? Most people confuse wisdom with knowledge. Sorry to disappoint those people but wisdom and knowledge are two completely different things.

Knowledge is something we acquire as we read more and more books or get to know more and more information. It’s very easy to acquire and almost anyone can acquire knowledge if they try to. But wisdom is something else. And wisdom is definitely more important than knowledge. Hey let us take an example of what the great physicist Albert Einstein said about wisdom.

He said that all the discoveries in finding that he has done never came to him through rational thinking, came through intuition. This intuition is what is called wisdom.

There is no teaching or curriculum of school in the world which can teach you wisdom. I think now you all might have a quite sound idea of what wisdom is. It’s not a knowledge, it is but an experience of knowledge.

Much said about humour and wisdom individually. Now let us talk about humour and wisdom and how they are related to each other. At face value it might seem almost impossible to connect any dots between the two words humour and wisdom.

Be patient my friends there is indeed a lot common between these two. Humour and wisdom make lethal combination just like Oreos and milk. Why do they work so well together? When people laugh, relax and open up. They have more receptive to your ideas.

People are more likely to accept your insight and wisdom if you can laugh, especially at yourself! Very few things can make people drop their guard and preconceived judgement more than humour.

When you are engaging in any sort of talking on dialogue with an audience on individual, and you want your audience a listener to adopt a new perspective, one of the best ways to do it is to open them up by making them laugh and then passing on your ideas to them.

It is highly possible that they will accept what you say or at least they will think on it from an unbiased point of view.

Is humour more important than wisdom? It is highly debatable. Whilst both of them can exist in isolation, each has its own importance. For most effective communication and desired outcomes, a combination of wisdom and humour is the most ideal to have.

Humour and wisdom goes hand in hand, quite similar to the obverse and the reverse side of a coin. They can never be separated from each other because good humour always originate from wisdom and nothing can have wisdom unless there is a tinge of humour in it.

The humour that wisdom creates is however not the ones you get at your regular comedy shows. This kind of humour is extremely healthy and invasive. It is humour with a purpose.

To conclude I would like to say that from time immemorial a combination of humour and wisdom has been used by great men to influence others and seek immovable difficulties. When there is a system there will be humour and healthy humour always originates from wisdom.