I gave a talk at PyCon a few weeks ago where I was really struggling to fit my content into the time slot.
I ended up editing out the first couple of minutes of the talk - the bit where I ramped up to the topic, gave a little bit of background about why I was qualified to talk about it, that kind of thing.
Instead I launched straight into my first point (which included a good joke)... and it worked.
A lesson I learned is that if the topic is interesting enough you can skip the intro and jump straight in to that material, and if you combine that with a joke you can capture the audience's attention just fine.
I ended up editing out the first couple of minutes of the talk - the bit where I ramped up to the topic, gave a little bit of background about why I was qualified to talk about it, that kind of thing.
Instead I launched straight into my first point (which included a good joke)... and it worked.
A lesson I learned is that if the topic is interesting enough you can skip the intro and jump straight in to that material, and if you combine that with a joke you can capture the audience's attention just fine.