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
