I love comedy. In fact, I love comedy so much that in July 2017 I founded a boutique PR agency for VC firms and technology companies.
Navigating a corporate tax return? A riot. Developing a system to keep tabs on tasks across multiple team members and projects? A barrel, as they say, of laughs. Growing a business during a global pandemic? Please excuse me while my actual sides split in literal half.
Okay, those things aren’t actually full of joy — but I have been tickled by how many similarities there are between running a small business and performing live comedy.
Both comedy and entrepreneurship require a thick skin and a brass neck. Both require a desire to do something that not many people ever want to do, let alone try. Both can be awkward to explain at dinner parties.
Here’s a small smorgasbord of comedy/biz crossover. Hopefully it will be relevant to all of the comedy-preneurs out there. I know of one (me), and I can’t wait to find the rest.
Nobody is as scary as the front-row-guy who doesn’t laugh
Whether you’re a stand-up comedian, or an avant-garde clown, your mission is to make people laugh. Spoiler: they don’t always laugh. Any comedian will be able to close their eyes and picture their last front-row-guy. The person who willingly came to see a comedy show, and sat there cross-armed and po-faced, even when surrounded by punters who are having a whale of a time.
Trust me; once you’ve faced down a front-row-guy, or perhaps several of them, you’ll never be thrown off your stride by a steadfast CEO or a world-weary venture capitalist again.
The serious point here is that performing comedy gives you absolute faith in your fundamentals: your material. This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t listen to feedback (we’ll come to that later), but you should not let unusual, overly emotional or seemingly unwarranted criticism alter your path.
In comedy, if you’ve worked hard on your material, workshopped it with other comedians and gigged it a bunch, then one stony-faced killjoy shouldn’t make you tear up the script.
The same applies to business. You need to have faith in your ability to do your work, your methods and your path to success. You know what you’re doing, and it should take more than the boardroom equivalent of a front-row-guy to change your mind.
Listen for laughter…
Always listen to feedback (see!). On stage, laughter is your feedback. A peal of laughter from an audience — or, nirvana from several audiences in a row — is a cast-iron indication that your ‘bit’ is working. Anything other than that, it needs to go back into the workshop.
What’s the only reason a comedian wouldn’t drop, or change, a bit that isn’t working? They’re not listening. And this doesn’t mean chucking the troublesome bit onto the great comedy scrapheap immediately (sometimes it does); but often it means tweaking, cutting, rewriting, editing.
The main point here — you’ve got to know who to listen to. In comedy I develop a lot of material in writers groups with other comedians. But there’s nothing like testing ideas in front of an audience. Writers groups are theoretical, whereas stage-time is immediate, practical and unforgiving. Your peers will tell you why a joke should land, but an audience will tell you, unequivocally, whether it really works.
In your industry: who are the people, or who is the audience, that provides the ‘real’ feedback? Is it the internal team who understands how your product works at a theoretical level, or is it the customer who love it the most? You know who it is. Listen to the people with dirty fingers.
Everything is about trust
Comedy is a high-wire act. If an audience believes you can stay on the tightrope, they’ll watch your every move attentively. If they think you’re likely to wobble to an unglamorous end, you might as well be face-down on the mat already.
It’s all about trust. Audiences want to know that you’re in control. Then they can relax, listen and enjoy themselves.
Getting this trust game right can transform a room of nervous grandmas from East Cheam into a cauldron of laughter.
The same rule applies in business. Your new client — or your new colleagues, even — likely don’t know you beyond a referral. What do you do that engenders trust from day one?
How do you demonstrate that you’re a ‘pro’? Often this isn’t a party trick, it’s a system. Do you have a set of working methodologies, or a framework, that you can use to turn a spluttering motor into a well oiled machine?
Trust your potential for invention
Live comedy reminds you of the limitless potential of human invention. At its best, a well crafted joke, a completely original character or the slightest movement of a physical comedian’s hand transforms an empty room above a pub into a place that you will remember for the rest of your life.
Some of us invent novel AI systems. Some of us invent groundbreaking medical devices. Some of us invent something really useful like jokes about gangsters. But whatever you invent, trust it. Push it as far as you can push it. It’s magic. It’s the difference.
That’s probably quite enough
In comedy, you’ve got to know when to leave the stage.
