Can anyone be funny? Nature or nurture. If you apply yourself and be trained on it. You can get better, or funnier. Like singing, it is part of the cultural package of being human.
But being funny should feel true to the person, and individual. Authenticity is so important. You need to connect to the audience.
If someone is really guarded, and not sharing anything of themselves then you find it hard to connect with the person. If they share a vulnerability, you connect with them.
Being boring or guarded is usually a result of the wrong topic or question. If you’re stuck in a boring conversation redirect your attention to becoming genuinely curious about the other person. What makes them light up?
With comedy you need the audience to connect with you. If you aren’t connected with the person, you don’t laugh. It’s a choice to laugh. Connection is a pre-requisite to laughter. A shortcut to connection is sharing a vulnerability or a personal truth.
Audiences relax when there is no pressure to laugh. For a comedian who is visibly tense and nervous and anxious for a laugh, the audience will tense up. For someone who just comes on and shares a few things on their mind, the audience is relaxed. There is no expectation of laughter.
There’s a tension when a new standup comes out to the audience. You have to get the audience to laugh inside the first 20 seconds. You have to go on looking like you know what you’re doing. Step into the space, adjust the microphone with confidence. If you say something joke-shaped inside the first 20 seconds, you will get a laugh. The quicker it comes the better.
This is true of presentations and teaching too. One of the best pieces of advice I ever received about public speaking was to leave an uncomfortably long pause at the start of your presentation. When the audience became nervous you were going to mess it up, then begin with confidence.
Obviously this only works if you can pull of the confident opening.
The analytical part of your brain is separate from the playful part of your brain. So you need to separate out the two.
If you try and analyse your creativity and create something new at the same time they will cancel each other out. You need a phase of being playful, and not analysing it at all. This is the idea of the writer’s “shit first draft“, the painter’s quick sketch, the comedian trying out new material.
Then you can shift back into the analytical mode. And disect what isn’t working, what is, and what could be improved. To steal a sports analogy, you play back the game tape. To objectively observe what did and didn’t work.
As a comedian, or for anyone trying to be funnier, one simple tactic is to think “how could it be worse”. How bad is this going to get? How can you combine stories from two / three different occasions? Or exaggerate / extrapolate to a future where things are even worse.
Good comedy and good presentations have one thing in common: surprises.
Most presentations are not surprising. The slide deck is sent to you in advance, then you hear it all said, while you also have someone reading off the slide. Then you get sent the deck at the end.
As soon as you start to think: how can I surprise the audience? And how can I surprise the audience several times? Then you are taken into a playful space. It’s something very few people think about.
Surprises wake you up. They make things memorable. So, when you are presenting on a topic. Think about what you want someone to remember after the fact. And make the unveiling or arrival of that thing a surprise. Then it will be memorable.
Backwards design is how you get there. Work backwards from the memorable idea.
We know that being boring is bad. People aren’t interested in hearing from us. Often, in corporate life, what you are talking about is dull.
But there are ways to flip around the dull. To insert surprise into dull topics.
For example, Track Changes was a learning design company I used to run. This makes it sound very grand. It was just me freelancing. But the idea still stands.
The tag line I used was “we make useful online courses”. To subvert this, flip it around, we could say.
“It’s a fact that a lot of online education is dull and uninteresting. It might be important but it’s not interesting. We all sit through a lot of dull online courses where we are just clicking ‘next’ to end the session and go to the pub. We all know this will never change. And there’s nothing we can do about it.
“Well, there is. At Track Changes we help learning teams create useful online courses….”
When they’re presenting, most people don’t use misdirection. They move from this is what I’m going to say, to this is me saying it, to that is what I just said.
Hiding where it is going is much more useful than thinking of it as somehow nefarious. ‘Misdirection’ sounds like an insidious marketing tactic.
Hiding where it is going is just delaying the surprise.
I would often feel uncomfortable using some of the tactics in here. My natural inclination is to be more reserved. Growing up, my teachers always told me I needed to speak up more in class. I was too shy, I needed to participate.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realised part of my reserved nature is a fear that others can preemptively detect something “boring” about me. Even before a meaningful interaction takes place.
It becomes self-fulfilling. Any normal social cue (someone looking around, checking their phone) gets interpreted as confirmation of this fear. I approach most social interactions already anticipating rejection. And this anticipation creates anxiety and hyper-vigilance.
I felt I was never being authentic if I used some of the tactics Chris Head outlines here. But I’m leaving this episode with a quote from Sinead O’Connor rattling round my head. “Theatre is the revenge of the shy.”
Track Changes 
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