Do You Talk Funny?. David Nihill
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event! He knew nothing of my fear of public speaking and had no idea just how bad I was at it. He just knew me as someone who was full of words in everyday life and scared of very little. There was no way that I could say no. To this point I would have described my fear of public speaking as crippling. A description that, in this moment, paled in comparison to the reality my friend was facing, and a more fearful, life-altering application of the word.
Knowing what I had gotten myself in for, I set out to learn all I could about stand-up comedy and public speaking before the event. Tim Ferriss is an author and entrepreneur who popularized the idea of “meta learning,” learning a skill in the shortest amount of time possible. In The 4-Hour Chef: The Simple Path to Cooking Like a Pro, Learning Anything, and Living the Good Life, Ferriss deconstructed a skill he wanted to master into its most basic components and determined which of those components would give his ability the biggest boost. As a huge Tim Ferriss fan, I figured this would be a great way to raise the bar for my public speaking ability.
There was just one problem.
In The 4-Hour Chef, Ferriss opted to learn how to cook. It was something he wanted to do, not something that made him want to drop into the fetal position on the floor of his presumably very Zen kitchen. The idea of throwing myself headfirst into the ABCs of public speaking sounded terrible. There had to be another way, something else that I could learn that was aligned with public speaking but didn’t make me want to flee to Japan with my bow and arrows to study yabusame. But what?
Stand-up comedy.
The idea of stand-up comedy rattled through my brain for just a second, but I heard it loud and clear. I liked to make people laugh and, provided that they were my friends and not an audience, I was pretty good at it. Stand-up put you on a stage. In front of people. To sink or swim or run off the platform in tears. Yes, stand-up would be my gateway skill.
I wondered if stand-up comedy could be broken down into processes aimed at mastery, as tested and popularized by Ferriss in his top-selling books. Could I use comedy to craft more memorable, engaging, and effective presentations for the audience without making myself want to die? What should I focus on in order to obtain the outcome I desired? What are comedians learning the hard way on stage, often through trial and error as they clock those ten thousand hours that author Malcolm Gladwell says make a master? How does someone who feels they are not naturally funny kill it on stage? By studying comedy and the processes stand-up comedians use, can we make our presentations and key messages stand out while overcoming fears of public speaking? Can this be done quickly?
I’d soon find out that the answer to all of these is “yes.”
For one full year I became a comedian called “Irish Dave.” Being from Ireland, I thought this was a stage name that seemed far too obvious to bestow on myself, but Americans seemed to like it, so I committed to being Irish Dave for a year. (How hard could it be? I was already Irish and already called Dave.) New comedians, due to lack of experience, find it hard to get bookings on paid shows, so I made it look like “Irish Dave” had been around doing comedy for a while, back in Ireland of course. I created a website, a Facebook fan page, you name it: Irish Dave, “He’s big in Ireland”—a fact that surprisingly nobody questioned. Would “American Dave” make it big stateside? Probably not.
I am a keen kite surfer, and one day after a session under the Golden Gate Bridge, I told a fellow kite surfer my show-hosting predicament. As chance would have it, he was a comedian in his spare time and took it upon himself to organize my professional comedy debut. He contacted a booker friend, bending the truth ever so slightly by telling him I was a very funny comedian visiting from Ireland. Before I knew what was happening I was scheduled to perform for twenty minutes as part of a paid show. Twenty minutes! With the charity show for Arash looming, I agreed to take the stage. It was certainly baptism by fire but, amazingly, it wasn’t so bad. I got a few laughs along the way and it was a huge improvement from my days as Mustafa from Southern Yemen, the Corona-fueled madman with Shakin’ Stevens moves and occasional opinions on human resource management.
I decided I would keep the experiment going for a year, regardless of how the charity show went. I dedicated myself to applying the Pareto Principle (aka the 80/20 Principle, based on the concept that 80 percent of results come from 20 percent of the actions), which is to say that I would set about determining which set of actions to focus on to bring the greatest results. I would figure out what makes a joke funny, how to best craft and deliver it, and what comedians knew that business speakers did not. I have always walked the line between business and comedy in my own life, so this seemed like a great excuse to combine the two. If I could help a few others by documenting what I learned along the way, then the quest would be worth it.
I kept this experiment mostly to myself. I had just left a well-paying corporate job and was unsure of my next move. I didn’t really want to worry my family by telling them I was about to put my time into becoming a stand-up comedian . . . temporarily, with no goal to be an actual full-time comedian. The next booked show I did was five ladies and me. The name of that show: “Estrogen Entrée with a Side of Balls”—yes, I was that side of balls. I could imagine the conversation with my father: “So . . . David, glad to see you have left your job to become a side of balls . . . Do you think you might go back to being employed anytime soon?”
Why the focus on comedy? Beyond the demands of my comfort level, what made me so sure that stand-up would help me become a better public speaker?
For one, because science says so. “The brain doesn’t pay attention to boring things,” notes biologist John Medina in his best-selling book Brain Rules. He writes that “emotionally charged” events like laughter trigger a dopamine release, which “greatly aids memory and information processing. You can think of it like a Post-it note that reads, ‘Remember this!’”
Also, today’s audience has been conditioned to receive info via humor. Thank Jon Stewart that people no longer watch 20/20 or Nightline for news. They want infotainment, not information.
Carmine Gallo is a news anchor turned author, columnist, and keynote speaker. In short, he’s a guy people actually want to listen to. He says humor is one of the nine key elements in successful TED talks that are “scientifically proven to increase the likelihood that your pitch or presentation will be successful, whether you’re pitching to one person or speaking to thousands.” It also “lowers defenses, making your audience more receptive to your message.”1
As we will see later in the book, there are several TED talks that produce more laughs per minute than the classic comedy The Hangover. Needless to say they are also a lot more informative. At the time of writing, every one of the ten most popular TED talks moves the humor needle.
Top speakers, savvy startups, leading ad agencies, and Fortune 500 firms alike are turning to humor as the ultimate tool for being memorable amidst the ringtones, vibrations, and swipe-rights of modern life, and you should be, too. Great speakers know this. Every time I watch effective business speakers, I see the same techniques used by stand-up comedians at work. If the goal is improved public speaking, stand-up comedy offers a solid means of achieving it.
“If the goal is improved public speaking, stand-up comedy offers a solid means of achieving it.”
Darren LaCroix, who brings incredible stories and captivating humor to conferences around the globe, says he was “born without a funny bone in his body,” but touts himself as living proof that humor is a skill that can be learned. A self-proclaimed “student of comedy,” he applies that humor to public speaking. In 2001, Darren out-spoke twenty-five thousand contestants from fourteen countries to win the coveted title of World Champion of Public Speaking (yes, they exist). According to Darren, there are three keys to public speaking success: “stage time, stage time, and stage time.”
Open mic nights offer a perfect opportunity for inexperienced speakers to perform for a small audience, and they run nightly in all major cities. In New York City, it is not uncommon for an aspiring comedian to go on stage more than four times in one night. Most professional comedians will tell you that, to make a living from comedy, it takes around seven years. Many average four hours a day honing their craft—including