Humor Farm Sterling, Virginia

6/7/20

 

This is my second visit to the Humor Farm.  It’s strange how I noticed so much more now that I'm blogging about my Toastmasters sojourn. Here are couple of observations up front:

• Bill was there early with his smiling face at 3:15 when we logged on, but the meeting did start eight minutes late.
• This club has 8 members on the rolls.  At today’s meeting they had 6 members and 5 visitors.  
• We had one speaker, one evaluator, and the rest of the time was spent on Improv exercises  (which is done in replacement of table topics).  
• At this club, they do round-robin evaluations of the speaker before the assigned evaluator provides feedback. Steve volunteered to serve as the assigned evaluator.

Everyone had the opportunity to participate during the four Improv exercises.

1. "Yes, and..."
   Two people viewed a captionless cartoon and, going back and forth, built on the story about that cartoon.
2. Tell a story.
   One person started a story and the next person had to continue the story by starting with a word that began with the last letter of the last word of the previous person's statement. 
3. Zip Zap Zop 
   Point to someone and say "Zip Steve."  Steve says "Zap Cynthia."  I say "Zop" and  someone else's name.  The goal is to not get the Zip, Zap and Zop order confused.
4. What is it? 
   Choose and object and ask someone what it is. That person needs to think of something other than the actual use of the object. 

It was a fun club to attend.  

If I were giving a little feedback:

• Avoid having participants serve in multiple roles. Tom and Teri had two roles each.
• Mix up the Improv games. Steve and i did three of the games the last time we were there.  Tom did say he visited Laugh Lovers Toastmasters in California a few days ago and learned the fourth Improv game. 

Although this is a fun club, with the Improv games, I don’t think they are encouraged to do the Toastmasters educational program.  If they are, with one speaker they won’t get very far very fast.  However, it is possible that all  members of this club are also members of other clubs and this is just one they attend for fun.