Do You Talk Funny?. David Nihill
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invest roughly 1,460 hours of time each year to improving their skills, adding up to over ten thousand hours in a seven-year period. If stage time is the key to making it as a keynote, then adhering to even a fraction of the stand-up comedian’s practice schedule is a smart move.
Most comedians will invest an estimated twenty-two hours of work for every minute of a one-hour special show (normally produced yearly). As business speakers, we don’t need sixty minutes. Even one minute’s worth of comedy—with four to five laughs taken and spread out over a nine-minute business talk—will make you much funnier (and more effective) than 90 percent of business speakers out there, because most speakers and presentations are boring! Most should come with a pillow, a warm glass of milk, and a Snuggie!
My time with the Irish government and financial services company PricewaterhouseCoopers combined to make me one of the most well-rested men in Ireland. Because most presentations are glorified snooze-fests, long keynotes are becoming a thing of the past. Who has an hour to focus on one person? Most people switch off at around the ten-minute mark. As John Medina references in Brain Rules, studies by noted educator Wilbert McKeachie demonstrate that “typically, attention increases from the beginning of the lecture to ten minutes into the lecture and decreases after that point.” This is why many TED talks are now shorter than ten minutes.
They figured out that brevity is levity.
And they’re not the first to have discovered this. Some of the best speeches in history have clocked in at under ten minutes. Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address was 272 words and lasted less than three minutes; Winston Churchill’s “Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat” speech was 688 words and just over five minutes. The most powerful emotional expression two humans can say to each other is just three words: “I,” “love,” and “cake.”
Stand-up comedy, at its basic principles, is a combination of material (what you say) and delivery (how you say it). It is no different than typical speeches or presentations. TV slots for new comedians tend to be under five minutes, which forces them to continuously refine and refine and refine again in order to get maximum impact from each word. There is a saying in comedy that “a tight five is better than a sloppy fifteen.” Yet business presentations worldwide fail to abide by the same principle. Instead, there tends to be a lot of sloppy fifteens. Why? The necessary stage time, structure, and conscious editing for maximum impact just aren’t there—most people don’t have to speak often enough to get it. Conversely, the speakers who deliver their talk most tend to be the best and most polished. They know where the laugh lines are, they know what phrasing works best, and they know their timing. Just like stand-up comedians.
Since the crash of 2008, employment markets and popular perspectives on how work should be have fundamentally shifted. The loyalty that comes from long-term employers and single-company careers is gone. People no longer stand for their company because they have little faith that their company will stand for them. To be safe, and indeed to prosper in this economy, what you can do and who you are need to be transferable; what you did and whom you did it for doesn’t really matter anymore.
As Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, says, it’s time for The Start-Up of You. It’s time, as author James Altucher says, to Choose Yourself. To do this you need to market yourself—whether you like it or not—just as Tim Ferriss, the 4-Hour Chef author who inspired me, has done so successfully. A big part of this is taking every opportunity to tell your story. Tim, as it happens, is no fan of public speaking either. What does he have to say about it? “If you’re getting chased by a lion, you don’t need to run faster than the lion, just the people running with you. Speaking with other people is similar: you don’t need to be perfect, you just need to be better than a few others.”2
Learning from stand-up comedy can give us a huge advantage in building our public speaking ability by providing the tools to help us not only outrun the lion, but leave him laughing in our dust. And that is the premise of this book. That is what I’m going to show you: how to use comedy techniques to transform your public speaking, and by doing so, help make the world a lot more entertaining for everybody.
In one year, I went from being deeply afraid of public speaking to being able to headline a stand-up comedy show, host a business conference and charity event, and speak at multiple business gatherings. For one full year, I performed as Irish Dave, the “accomplished” comedian, in several hundred shows across all of Northern California’s top comedy clubs. I also interviewed several hundred comedians, performers, and public speaking experts and read every book, quote, and guru I could find on the topic. I broke the techniques down, applied the 80/20 Principle (thanks, Pareto), and performed a series of experiments on yours truly to determine the seven key principles, or habits, that brought forth the biggest outcome. I explain these seven key principles in this book. I explore each of the seven comedy habits in its own chapter in detail and follow them with a series of short exercises to apply the learning.
Some of you just grimaced like a bulldog chewing a wasp. Exercises? Don’t worry! They are easy and based on what’s worked in teaching these concepts to thousands of people. (There is a free workbook to accompany this book, available at http://7comedyhabits.com/workbook). You can get just the tips at any time by going to the Tipliography section (yes, I did invent that word) in the back of the book. It’s like a bibliography, only useful, and of course, spelled differently. (The Tipliography section can also be obtained free at http://www.7comedyhabits.com/80tips). These are seven principles and a host of tips that would have saved me a lot of time and embarrassment if I had only known them earlier. Trust me, if I could defeat Shakin’ Stevens, you can get over your own fears, too.
My year of study and self-experimentation brought me to three conclusions:
1. Top business speakers are using humor.
2. They are developing laugh lines using the same process as comedians, even though most are unaware of it.
3. You don’t need to be naturally funny to get laughs. Most comedians I met were not.
To be honest, I still have a fear of public speaking. The difference now is it’s manageable. I have a tried and tested array of stories and funny anecdotes I know will initiate one of the most powerful forces available to mankind: laughter.
“I am from Ireland so I do have a bit of an accent. If I say something funny and you guys don’t laugh, I’m going to assume you didn’t understand and just say it again.”
I still use this line—in fact, I have used it many times—and it always gets a laugh. Developed in comedy clubs and at open mic nights, it’s the same line I use when speaking in a business environment, and it’s one of many. It follows a structure and a methodology that, when combined with six other habits, will make you a funnier speaker and make your fear of public speaking a thing of the past.
This is not a magic book. Simply reading these seven principles won’t make you instantly funnier, more successful, or more attractive. Add a little practice, however, and it just might.
“Stories are the creative conversion of life itself into a more powerful, clearer, more meaningful experience. They are the currency of human contact.”
–Robert McKee
I woke in the middle of the night to a series of loud rumbling noises. My location was a small, windowless room in volcanic Guatemala. I was twenty-five years old and had just moved in with a local family as part of a Spanish language school home-stay program. Unfortunately for me, the epicenter of this rumbling was my stomach, and the cause was food poisoning. And, as I was about to find out, it was a very bad dose. While I was curled up in the throes of intestinal anarchy, my host family was in the