My heartbeat races many beats above normal as I stand, feet firmly planted, on the Castro Theatre’s dark hardwood stage, whose construction has stood the test of time. The theater, a historic San Francisco landmark with a Spanish Colonial Baroque façade, has all the grandeur and style that one would expect to accompany its ninety-three years’ worth of celebrity performers—one of whom I am very much not. If you had the distinct misfortune to shake my hand before I took the stage, you would have felt like you had been assaulted by a semi-defrosted mackerel.
Despite my distinct lack of fame, eight hundred unfamiliar faces are looking back at me from the assembled crowd. When I arch my neck slightly to look toward the large, stretching ceiling, I am met with the curious gazes of another six hundred faces in the lavish upper-tier balcony. All eyes are firmly on me. On either side of the stage stand large organ grills. Even though I have the musical ability of a dead pigeon, the idea of playing a few notes at this point seems distinctly more appealing than allowing my vocal cords to do what science intended—simply emit words.
To those fourteen hundred pairs of inquisitive eyes in the audience, I probably look calm, collected, and confident. This is far from the truth. Turbulence is sweeping through my insides. I am so nervous I could lay an egg. I am, however, not just expecting to talk without imploding, a challenge enough in itself for someone with a distinct fear of public speaking—I am going to try and be funny. Moreover, I expect to be so funny that I believe I will not only make these strangers laugh but keep them fully engaged for the next several minutes.
The really crazy part is that not long ago I had never told a joke on stage. I had never even really been on a stage. The truth is that public speaking was, and still is, my single biggest fear. Even more than a stare down with a shark.
Byron Bay, Australia. I took a deep breath and swam within a few feet of the resting shark. He sat oblivious to my attention twenty-five feet below the surface, next to the Wollongbar, a sunken ship that lost its tie to the old Byron Bay Pier during a cyclone in 1921 and sank. Long abandoned by its intended occupants, the wreck is now home to Wobbegong sharks, which can grow to ten feet in length. They are the pit bull terriers of the ocean. Their often sleepy demeanor makes them appear passive, but they can leave a serious, lengthy, and rather painful impression.
In February 2004, a snorkeler named Luke Tresoglavic learned this the hard way. Bitten on the leg, Luke swam a thousand feet to shore, walked to his car, and drove to the local surf club . . . with the shark still attached. Luckily for Luke, the shark was young and just two feet long, and he only suffered puncture wounds to his leg from the shark’s razor-sharp teeth.
The target of my attention was a bigger creature—an impressive seven feet. I carefully detached my snorkel pipe from my mask and used it to reach out and tap the shark gently to initiate some movement. It obliged, rising and thrusting into motion with the same labored enthusiasm I do whenever I have a 4:00 A.M. flight to catch. As sunlight reflected through the clear waters, I looked upward toward my friends, only to glimpse a sea of bubbles and panicked limbs as they fled the scene of what I am sure they thought was about to be my untimely death.
Most people are afraid of sharks, it seems. I love them. Always have. The story has always rung true in my life: what most people are afraid of, I have been drawn toward. Danger, risk, and fun have always been intertwined for me. Skydiving, cliff jumping, bungee jumping, free diving, poking wild animals—these are exhilarating to me, not terrifying. I don’t chase the things that do scare me because being scared is about as pleasant as a cliff jump gone wrong. (Incidentally, when my cliff jumping did once go wrong, it led to a shattered leg on an isolated island, where the only form of medical assistance was a vet. I am thankful that despite his prior experience, he didn’t put me down.)
One thing, however, has always had the power to turn me into a shaking, sweating bag of wobbly jelly: public speaking. To say I hate it would be a huge understatement. For me, it’s everyone else’s shark, dentist, spider, and mother-in-law rolled into one big ball of terror.
So that’s why my being on stage in the San Francisco theater that night in front of fourteen hundred people is so crazy. I was a specialist in running away from stages at high speed. The times I did end up on them, I was a true Jedi Master at embarrassing myself. I have several such occasions to consider—all opportunities for me to shine that went south quickly.
“My name is Mustafa, and I am an exchange student from Southern Yemen.”
That was how I started my college Human Resource Management class presentation. Introducing myself as a person I clearly was not, from a place I was not, to a group of people who already knew me. Why? If only I knew. It seemed like a good idea after taking down four bottles of Corona in quick succession before taking to the podium. Before the presentation, I had walked into a group meeting with a six-pack in hand—two of which were already empty—and proceeded to drink two more while prepping for my turn to speak my brilliant opening lines. When speech time came, the lecturer understandably didn’t take kindly to my lighthearted approach and lightheaded comments. Don’t get me wrong—I am no alcoholic and your intervention is unnecessary. Drinking just seemed like a good idea to relax my nerves before speaking to the class. Had I known then what I know now, I certainly would have quickly vetoed my own plan.
That year, my final year at one of Ireland’s top schools, I received first-class honors in all subjects but one: Human Resource Management. Seventy percent was the magic number—it defined a first-class honor and was generally the highest mark one received at University College Dublin. My beer-soaked presentation had knocked me into a lower percentile and I graduated with a second-class honors degree. I felt bitter about it but only had myself to blame for my near miss. Damn fear of public speaking.
I took a year off to work and travel in Australia before returning to earn my master’s degree. I selected the same course with the same lecturer in order to correct my mistake and do better the second time around. The lecturer certainly hadn’t forgotten me or my terrible public speaking ability. For the second time running, she gave me the exact same grade. Again, it was her course that brought down my average, and that meant the difference between a first-class and a second-class honors degree. Essentially, in both my undergraduate degree and master’s degree, I narrowly missed out on earning the highest level possible due to my fear of public speaking.
It didn’t take long for my fear to worm its way into my new working life. I landed a job with the Irish government as a marketing executive, helping high-potential Irish startup companies expand in the United States.
The new recruits, myself included, had to present at a team get-together in New York. I had no beer available to calm my nerves this time. I also had nowhere to place the chart I had drawn to illustrate my main points to the assembled executives. As my nerves took hold, I frantically searched for the best section of wall to stick it to. One 4 × 4 framed section stood out. Perfect. I pulled a piece of duct tape and . . . “No!!!” I heard people suddenly scream. In my bumbling state, I had tried to stick my poster to a $40,000 piece of artwork that I didn’t even notice. Some say I made a terrible first impression. By some, I mean everyone.
Several years later I found myself in Shanghai, China, the only Westerner working in China for Hult International Business School, the world’s largest business school by enrollment. This sole-Westerner status, apparently, was enough to make me the ideal candidate to host the Asian leg of the Hult Prize, a global competition run in partnership with the Clinton Global Initiative. I actively tried to avoid it, but I needed the help of the organizer on another project, so I ultimately gave into the arm-twisting.
I was a nervous wreck as usual. As I took the stage, I had enough paper in hand to rival War and Peace. I stumbled through it terribly, relieved only by the knowledge that most of the assembled four-hundred-plus Chinese officials and participants had no idea how to comprehend an Irish accent. Of course, then I screwed up their Chinese names, too.
That certainly translated.
Three opportunities to improve my educational and professional standing, three tremendous failures that stemmed directly from my inability to stand in the front of a room and speak like a person. It didn’t make any sense. It didn’t fit with my personality. I wasn’t a painfully shy guy. I was outgoing. I could hold a conversation with just about anyone and walk away seeming intelligent, competent, and capable of handling pointy utensils. But the second I was faced with a captive audience, I became a guy my friends jokingly referred to as “Shakin’ Stevens.” My alter ego sweated. He stammered. He shuddered. Sometimes he BYO-Corona’ed. You wouldn’t trust Shakin’ Stevens with a sharp fork, let alone a roomful of clients.
The time came to put an end to this sequence of embarrassment, but it was certainly not a decision I made on my own.
When my friend Arash suffered a severe spinal cord injury, I suggested organizing a comedy show and recruiting some top comedians to perform in order to raise funds for his continued physical therapy. As luck would have it, my old neighbor, Tim, was a headlining comedian and kindly agreed to do it. What I didn’t anticipate was Arash’s insistence that I host the 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 writing, practicing, watching other comedians, and performing. Four hours a day means many dedicated comedians 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.