EVER WONDERED WHAT IT’S LIKE TO PERFORM STANDUP?…

9 things about performing stand-up comedy you should find useful at work

I spent a while performing standup comedy on London’s open-mic circuit. Along the way I learned some things. Number one – it's going to take waaay longer than I imagined to get on top of this thing. Number two – the fear newbie comics experience before they go on stage can deliver amazing weight-loss results. And number three – the validation you feel the first time an audience laugh at one of your jokes is so intoxicating it can erase your memory live on stage.

Most of the things I’ve learned really only apply to working hard at being a better comic. But a handful are proving useful when it comes to my day job. Some of them for me, others for the people I share them with.

If you work in a creative industry or do a lot of presenting, I reckon some of these things will help you as well. So read on and let me know:

Let people know who you are

Not with a business card: with your personality. What are you into? Where are you coming from? How do you see the world? You might well be the sharpest brain in the room but if you want people to buy into what you’re saying, you need to give them a sense of your persona – quickly. Honesty beats polish (unless you are honestly polished) and it’s not enough to simply try being someone’s mate. Find ways to be relatable from the moment you start speaking. No matter how niche the topic, or how small your audience, you need to find the stuff in it that resonates with them and you both.

Make it feel like a conversation

You know how pretty much every work presentation starts with a minor IT fail? That’s nature’s way of letting everyone know that slides should come second to conversation. There are plenty of comedians out there who use projectors as part of their acts: but the performance still feels like a conversation. They’re using tried and tested crowd-work techniques to bring people in and make them feel part of what’s going on. People don’t want to feel like they’re at the movies, they want to feel like they are in this with you and that they should pay attention.

Write something down now: find the juice later

If you think to yourself ‘there might be something in that’, simply write it out straight first to get it down. Then come back later and ‘punch it up’. Finding setups and payoffs, wordplay, making original observations, all that stuff is mentally intensive. You can burn hours doing it upfront and block yourself from teasing out new material before you’ve started. Much better to have something functional you can keep picking up and putting down, until it’s pulling as many punches as you can find.

It’s not about how many ideas you have, it's about the ideas you choose

Plenty of your ideas won’t stand up. But don’t let that bring you down. It’s simply the price of doing business with ideas. The important thing is to get better at identifying the ideas that do work; the ones that make people feel things. For me, with stand-up, I’ve noticed I’m usually on the right track if I start feeling a bit uncomfortable about the subject and how I’m delivering it. Because that means I’ve found a way in that’s a bit close to the bone, insightful or personal. That’s all good stuff for writing comedy. For other more serious forms of writing the point still stands. So if you're a newbie copywriter, take good briefs to heart then be your own creative director. After that, let your creative director be your creative director.

Don’t try to be funny, try to be surprising

They are often the same thing. That’s a rock-solid writing tip from comedy coaching maestro Chris Head. And it’ll stand anyone who gets the dreaded ‘just write something funny’ request in good stead. Because the things that amuse us are the things that shock us (within a range of tolerance set by the patience of your audience, hence all the live testing in stand-up). Watch any Netflix stand-up special and clock how comics set up a pattern you’re familiar with and then subvert it with something unexpected at the end. Or hop on youtube and watch Ricky Gervais introduce Robert Downey Junior at the 2011 Golden Globes and test your own threshold.

Take. It. S-l-o-w-l-y

The speed at which your mind fires off thoughts while you talk is insane. The speed at which the people listening to you are able to process what you’re saying is not insane: it is normal. And it’s normal to need time to digest things. So no matter how familiar you are with the material you’re using, spool it out nice and steady and stay tuned-in to your audience. The worst thing you can do is ‘crash the laugh’ by moving on too fast. It’s harder to do this in business meetings than comedy clubs. Because at least in comedy clubs the audience has permission to react. Whereas in business meetings, especially when you’re presenting ideas to groups, people after often guarded (and looking at their phones: put down your phones!!)

Refine, refine, refine.

Testing and honing new material in front of live audiences is what gives stand-up its magic. And like all magic, it’s not really magic, it’s just hard work. Sometimes you know you’ve got something interesting, so you share it, and it just isn’t working. So you refine it. Reordering words. Being clearer here. Adding a joke there. Ditching a bit over there. And so on. Until you’ve got that bit as sharp as it can be. The end result? Either you found life in something you almost threw away. Or, it just doesn’t work for audiences. It’s probably a good rule of thumb to test it three times out in the wild before you let it go. Every great stand-up show you ever saw was the product of endless trial and error and WIP sessions.

Let it go. Move on. (AKA: Give me the flashlight Russell)

In the five minutes I’ve been performing stand-up, I’ve been struck by how grounded comedians are about their material. They’ll work their ass off to get a bit really singing. They’ll know it’s good from a craft POV. But if it doesn’t make people laugh.... It’s gone. There’s no sense doggedly hanging onto something because you really dig it and a few of your good mates laugh along. You did it, you loved it, move on. Remember why you are stood up there and have faith in your ability to churn out more and more ideas – including ones that raise the roof for everyone.

Finally, be efficient.

Stand up is Swiss-watch efficient. Setup/Payoff. Setup/Payoff. Your writing and performance should be super-efficient too. So should mine: this post is well flippin’ long. Ooops. Like I said, I’m just a beginner when it comes to stand-up. And that feels great by the way, feeling like a beginner again. Do that too, any way you can, even if stand-up isn’t for you.