Page 266 - Use Your Memory

SPEECHES, JOKES, DRAMATIC PARTS, POEMS, ARTICLES AND BOOKS
prevent this, he wrote on the glass, 'I am the world's karate
champion,' and went to make his telephone call, securely thinking
that his beer was safe. When he returned, he immediately saw that
his glass was empty, and he noticed more scribbling underneath
his own. It read: 'Thanks for the pint - the world's fastest runner!'
To remember the joke, you consciously select Major Key
Words from it, joining them to form the basic narrative. All you
need from this entire joke are the Key Memory Words: 'pint',
'phone', 'karate champion' and 'running champion'.
To complete your memorisation, you imaginatively link the first
Key Word to the appropriate Key Word in the Major System, and
you use the Link System to connect the remaining three Key
Memory Words. There are two major advantages to using this
system: first, you will be able to remember clearly and categorise
whatever jokes you wish; and second, the mass involvement of your
right brain in the memorisation of the joke itself will make you a far
more creative and imaginative joke teller, thus overcoming the
second major problem for jokers, that of getting in a too rigid and
linear, left-brained memorisation mode, which bores the listener.
Dramatic Parts and Poems
For the university student, schoolchild and professional or ama-
teur actor, this aspect of memory can be the most troublesome of
all. The method usually recommended and employed is to read a
line over and over again, 'get it'; read the next line, 'get it'; join the
two together, 'get them'; read the next line and so on and so on ad
nauseam until the first lines have been forgotten.
Systems based on the Memory Principles and used successfully
by famous actors and actresses are the reverse. In this system the
material to be remembered is read and reread quickly (see Speed
Reading) and with understanding over a period of four days,
approximately five to ten times per day. If you read for under-
standing continually in this way, you will become far more familiar
with the material than you realise at the end of the twentieth
reading, and you will be able to recall, without looking at the text,
most of the material to be remembered. Your mind, especially if
you have used your right-brain imagination to help you under-
stand, will have absorbed practically 90 per cent of the infor-
mation, and remembering will have become a natural outgrowth
of proper reading and basic understanding using the tools of
imagination and association.
This system is far more successful than the line-by-line rep-
etition system, and it can be improved upon even further in the