There are few experiences in modern life more puzzling than attending a conference presentation. You arrive full of hope, armed with coffee and optimism, only to discover that the speaker has mistaken PowerPoint for a personality.
Within minutes, the room has taken on the atmosphere of a hostage negotiation. Delegates stare at their phones with the concentration of air-traffic controllers. Someone at the back begins a covert campaign to escape to the toilets. A man in the front row nods so vigorously that you initially assume he agrees with the speaker, until you realise he is asleep.
For years I sat through presentations like this and, if truth be told, occasionally gave a few. Then, quite by accident, I found myself wandering into the world of stand-up comedy. It was one of those career diversions that sensible people avoid and that therefore appealed to me immensely.
Stand-up comedy
What surprised me was that good comedians understood audiences far better than most professional presenters. In fact, after years of watching both professions at work, I have come to suspect that many conference speakers could improve dramatically if they spent a few evenings in a comedy club. Not necessarily performing as I did, you understand. Simply observing. It is difficult to overstate how educational it is to watch a comedian fail.
One of the first lessons I learnt was this: know your audience.
Audiences
Comedians are obsessed with audiences. Before going on stage, they want intelligence worthy of MI5. How many people are there? How old are they? Have they been drinking? Why have they come? Are they happy? Angry? Recently divorced?
Conference speakers, by contrast, often know less about their audience than they do about the hotel fire regulations.
I once gave an after-dinner speech to a professional gathering where I used material that had worked wonderfully elsewhere. It died so completely that I briefly wondered whether I had accidentally switched languages midway through. Afterwards, a veteran comedian explained the problem in a single word: demographics.
He was right. Audiences are not interchangeable. A room full of medical students behaves differently from retired accountants. A gathering of engineers laughs in different places from a gathering of salespeople. Presenters who ignore this are like fishermen who complain there are no fish while casting into a swimming pool.
Being funny is serious business
Another lesson from comedy is that being funny is serious business.
People imagine comedians simply wander on stage and start chatting. This is rather like imagining Formula One drivers just pop down to the shops at 200 miles an hour.
Good comedy involves writing, editing, testing, rewriting, discarding and endless rehearsal. A joke that lasts ten seconds may have taken ten hours to construct.
The same applies to presentations.
I often meet speakers who spend weeks researching their subject then they type up the PowerPoint slides as a shortcut to writing the presentation. The result is a performance so constrained it is like complaining that a straight jacket is a bit tight under the arms.
Stand-up taught me that every sentence should have a purpose. Every story should earn its place. Every slide should justify its existence. If it cannot, it should be removed with the decisiveness normally reserved for unexploded ordnance.
I was once asked by an eminent academic for “a few jokes to pep up the middle of a conference speech”, assuming applying humour is like sticking a go-faster stripe on a car.
Persona
Perhaps the most valuable lesson I learnt concerns something comedians call persona.
Every successful comedian knows who they are on stage. They may not be that person in real life, but they understand exactly how the audience sees them.
Presenters often neglect this entirely. I once attended a conference where a chairman introduced a speaker as a renowned comedy writer and entertainer. The audience immediately brightened. They sat forward expectantly. Unfortunately, the speaker then delivered a forty-minute lecture on policy implementation. The sense of disappointment was almost visible. It hovered over the room like industrial fog.
The poor fellow wasn’t a bad speaker. He simply wasn’t the person the audience had been led to expect.
As for being intimidated by the audience, pitch it right and you can get away with a lot. When I tutored fledgling medics on presentation technique, one was terrified when she was asked to speak at the cardiology lunchtime meeting, where she would be the least experienced person in the room. When I convinced her to make this her claim to fame, she had them eating out of her hand. I think she used the opener: “Believe it or not, I am an expert: X, and unknown quantity; and spurt, a drip under pressure”.
Stand-up taught me that audiences need to know who you are. Are you serious? Informative? Inspirational? Entertaining? A mixture of all four? Decide what your credentials are before you begin. If you don’t, the audience will decide for you, and they are not always generous.
Trust
Closely allied to persona is trust. Audience has to trust you, the performer. Can they sit back and relax in your company or are they going to be abused/intimidated/patronised or have their time wasted. Use the tricks of the trade to win their trust: connect with the audience, start from where they are, let them see your feet (old adage in standup – they won’t trust you if they can’t see your feet, so get out from behind that lectern/top table), know your opening and make eye contact with confidence.
Learn your material
Ah, memory. One of the curious modern beliefs is that nobody needs to remember anything because technology exists. As a result, presentations increasingly resemble guided readings. Speakers stand beside giant screens and read aloud text that the audience can already read for themselves. It is a strange ritual, rather like hiring a pianist to point at sheet music.
Comedians rarely work this way. They learn their material.
The reason is simple. The more you rely on notes, the less attention you can give the audience. Your eyes are on the page when they should be on the people.
I am not suggesting every presenter should memorise an entire speech word for word. That way madness lies. But knowing your opening, your closing and your key stories thoroughly will transform your confidence and delivery.
‘Dying’
Finally, stand-up taught me something surprisingly comforting. Bad performances happen.
Sometimes the audience is tired. Sometimes the room is wrong. Sometimes the organisers have placed you behind a lectern the size of a Victorian wardrobe. Sometimes the speaker before you has drained all remaining life from the audience and left you to perform the professional equivalent of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
Comedians know this. They call it “dying”. The useful thing about comedy clubs is that dying happens regularly enough for performers to develop perspective. They learn that one bad night is not a verdict on their worth as human beings.
Presenters could benefit from the same attitude.
What did I learn?
So, what did stand-up comedy ultimately teach me about presentations?
Know your audience. Prepare meticulously. Be clear about who you are. Learn your material properly. Accept that not every performance will be a triumph. Let them see your feet.
And perhaps most importantly, remember that audiences are human beings, not obstacles standing between you and the buffet lunch.
Comedians understand this instinctively. Their survival depends upon it.
The rest of us, standing nervously beside our slides while wondering whether anyone is listening, would do well to borrow a few tricks from the people who spend their evenings trying to make complete strangers laugh. After all, if they can survive a Saturday night in a comedy club, surely, we can manage the quarterly sales meeting.
