Wednesday, April 16, 2008

What A Way To Go Out: Extra Credit Blog



First of all, I apologize for the big yellow line in the clip - I feel the speech is worth the annoyance.

This speech is at a Harvard Graduation and begins with an amazing attention getter. Will Ferrell is introduced by two student government members and then there is extremely energetic music and a brief dance by Ferrell which creates the perfect mood for his speech.

The beginning of his speech is spent joking around about which speech he should actually be presenting at - this is important because he was hired to speak at this event to provide a humerous ending to 4 years of hard work.

This section of the speech (this is part 1 of 5) is actually just the introduction to the rest of the speech so I will evaluate it only on its merits as an introduction. He does a great job of keeping eye contact with the audience and using a variety of voice tones in order to keep the speech entertaining. He gives us an idea of what will be talked about throughout the rest of the speech when he says he will 'give it to us straight'.

He concludes his introduction with yet another joke which smoothly transitions the speech into it's body while maintaining the humor that is required from a comedian speaking at a graduation. This speech also shows how perfectly calm and natural will ferrell is while performing in front of an audience. Unlike my last post (Professional Nerds) this speaker is well rehearsed and very calm.

One last bit of praise....In this speech Ferrell does a great job of using body movement and hand gestures to further keep the audience engaged. This was a very fun speech to watch!

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