After Dinner Speakers

I used to be a tutor at a weekend creative writing series of courses. One weekend a man turned up who was a home office pathologist (but he didn't want anyone else to know this). He said his aim was "to write articles like Bernard Levin" which I thought an admirable aim if one that few people, I felt, could achieve. He produced a few examples of his attempts which were reasonably good but I had the feeling that it wasn't something he would excel at.
When he came next time he said his intention had changed: he no longer wished to write like Bernard Levin but to learn how to give after-dinner speeches. He had, he said, enroled at an "after-dinner speaking course" or maybe just a get-together. The reason he wished to do this was that he said he was often asked to be a guest speaker at various functions and felt he wasn't very good at it.
He tried to inject more humour into his speeches or talks. They worked quite well but I felt, though didn't tell him, that he was not a natural after-dinner speaker.
What is natural after-dinner speaker? I don't think there's a definition but it has something to do with timing, good, clear delivery of course and with an x quality that only the speaker himself is able to bring out. In other words, some are good at it and others aren't.
I don't know if he ever succeeded in his aim to become a successful after-dinner speaker but if he did I am told there's a lot of money to be made out of it. Maybe by now he's given up cutting up corpses for the maybe more lucrative job of "cutting the mustard" on the after-dinner speaking bandwagon.