A surefire way to make safety training more engaging is to inject some elements of humor. But adding a pinch of funny flavor to your presentations isn’t always easy. Whether you’re well-practiced in the art of humor or just starting to flirt with it, these tips will help you elevate meetings, training sessions and toolbox talks from boring chores to informative comedy sets.

Picture people with their clothes on.

If you’ve heard the advice to open with a joke, then you’ve probably also heard that if you’re nervous, you should picture the crowd in their underwear before giving a presentation. Picturing people in their underwear doesn’t introduce a calming sensation any more than opening with a joke will introduce humor into a safety presentation.

Keep it real relevant.

The humor needs to be relevant to the presentation, otherwise, the audience will wonder why you’re wasting their time. Opening with a joke can destroy your entire presentation (and your credibility as a trainer) if it bombs.

Practice being funny.

Build testing your humor into your preparation time. A study conducted among learning and design professionals by ATD determined that traditional classroom training requires an average of 38 hours of preparation for a one-hour session. You might want to consider devoting some extra attention to getting your humor right.

Be the star of your own video.

Follow the sage advice of practicing your speech or presentation in front of a mirror. A mirror may be a useful tool to get a close-up look at yourself delivering your presentation, but getting it on video is an even better solution. A video can show you what you need to work on for your presentation, from voice pitch and timing to delivery and body language. And it will identify any nervous tics you need to work out before you go live.

Do a dress rehearsal… or TWELVE!

Show the footage to—or, better yet, practice in front of—a small audience before your presentation to test out your humor. How else do you think comedians know whether their jokes will work or not? They usually try them out with a small audience first before adding them to their act. If they bomb, they just move on to the next joke.

Set the stage.

You can also set the tone of your training before it begins. Wardrobe, props, pictures, videos and music are all great subtle ways to insert humor into your safety training presentation without overdoing it. When you change the perception or mood of the room, people will generally be more receptive to learning. These simple tactics are not offensive and don’t waste anyone’s time. Once you’ve broken the ice, you’ll find that the audience is more willing to tolerate sections that may be a little more technical or dry (as often is the case with safety training) because they trust that you will bring them back to life with more humor.

Turn your blunder into a laugh.

But what happens if you bomb? Since you’re not a comedian and you’re only adding minimal humor, moving on to the next joke isn’t an option. Your best bet is to acknowledge your blunder. Make a joke out of your failed attempt at humor and you’re sure to get a laugh (and reestablish that bond with your allies).

Positively change perception.

Being involuntarily confined to safety training can cause people to be closed-off and downbeat—so it’s important to keep the humor positive since some participants will walk into the training with a negative attitude and no desire to change it. Sarcasm and negative humor generally produce adverse results in this type of setting and can make an already unimpressed attitude turn worse. Derogatory humor can also kill your credibility with your audience because it veers on the negative side—showing a critical or disrespectful attitude, even if it’s aimed at yourself, is not a good way to get a laugh. You need to nurture the relationship with useful information and positive humor to yield good results.

Let the audience know you’re human.

Self-effacing humor, like laughing at something you’ve done, can work in safety training when the audience is more receptive and engaged. Letting the audience know you’re human is a great way to keep them positive. Storytelling works well for this type of humor. True stories make the most compelling points and the stories can be exaggerated for effect. Anecdotal stories (based on second-hand accounts rather than hard facts) help people come together—it certainly helps the trainer seem more relatable and the stories do not have to strictly be your own. You can tell a story about a conversation you overheard or retell someone else’s story, so long as it helps you get your message across.

Paint a picture with the story. It will inspire a laugh and help people remember the point you were illustrating by leveraging their episodic memory.

Apply the rule of three.

Don’t forget the rule of three when planning your story or joke (you know the old three guys walk into a bar setup). In writing, when you’re listing things, you use the rule of three—it’s the smallest number required to make a pattern and three is an easy number of things to remember. The rule of three dictates that you set up the patterns, listing two similar items and then overthrow expectations by listing an incongruent idea with the third item. In this case, there is a magic number for funny—it’s three.

Embrace human error.

A lot of times, stories or jokes contain elements of human error. So long as it doesn’t have a serious outcome, human error can be funny. America’s Funniest Home Videos is based on this premise. In a safety training setting, human error can be used as a teachable moment. You get the laugh, but then pose the question of how it could have been worse, taking it from funny to serious.

Start with what you find funny and go from there.

When trying to plan your presentation, it’s best to start with material that you find funny and share it (don’t try to steal or pass it off as your own). But don’t rely on your memory to recite it later (there’s a good chance you’ll butcher it). Instead, take notes on your phone and transfer it into a humor journal when you get home. Once you get into the habit of doing this, you’ll be thankful for all the moments you’ve captured when you least expected to.

Keep these tips in mind next time you’re preparing a presentation and engagement is sure to follow. By complementing your other soft skills with a well-honed sense of humor, you’ll be keeping folks entertained while helping them stay safe.

This blog post is an excerpt that was adapted from Seriously Funny: How to Use Humor in Safety, which reviews the what, where, why and how to do humor in safety presentations in an easy-to-digest guide. Download it for tips, tricks and useful advice to add humor to workplace safety presentations.