Speech of the Day: On Humor

I'm taking a Rhetoric class with Veritas Press, and recently we were assigned to do encomiums on (speeches in praise of) some abstraction or virtue as part of our speeches of the day. It was supposed to be written out beforehand, and then we were to read it out loud in class. The time limit was ten minutes, but the speech could not go below seven minutes and thirty seconds.

The speech I wrote is only about a thousand words, so the night before I gave it I rehearsed it over and over to try to get it above seven minutes. I kept coming in at six minutes and thirty seconds. Finally, after at least four times reading it, I got it to stretch out for seven minutes, fifty-six seconds.

The next day, in class, I had a timer going the whole time so I could see how long I was taking. I had read about three quarters of the speech when I realized that I still had three minutes left if I wanted to get it to eight minutes. I started to panic a little. But I was coming up on the second longest paragraph, so I read that one incredibly slowly (probably slower than I needed to). It must have taken about two minutes to read, because after I finished it I only had a minute left. I came in at a little over eight minutes.

And today I got my grade back: 100 %!

I've included the speech text below. I chose "humor" as my subject.