5 Lessons Standup Comedians Can Teach You About Public Speaking

If you want to improve your public speaking, there is no better place to look than the world of standup comedy.

A good comedian is a master of public speaking. Not only do they have to be confident and comfortable on stage, but they are expected to be humorous and entertaining as well. As Jerry Seinfeld once said, “No one is more judged in civilized society than a standup comedian. Every 12 seconds you’re rated.”

Standup comedy is one of the most difficult professions to be successful at. They have to face tremendous amounts of failure and embarrassment before they can get to where they are. And there is nothing more humiliating than “bombing” in front of an audience, where every joke lands flat and everyone is left staring at you blankly as you try to squeeze out a few laughs.

In the new book Do You Talk Funny? 7 Comedy Habits to Become a Better (and Funnier) Public Speaker, David Nihill enters the world of standup comedy and discovers key lessons that anyone can use to improve their public speaking.

Whether you’re giving a public presentation to a business, school, or government organization, there is a lot you can learn from standup comedy. And learning these skills can really take your speaking ability to the next level.

Unlike a comedian, most public speakers aren’t expected to be very funny or entertaining. But even adding just a little bit of humor to your presentation will make you stand out from the crowd and become more memorable.

Here are a few key lessons we can learn from standup comedians on how to improve our public speaking abilities.

Master the art of story-telling

People rarely remember information unless it is presented in the form of a story.

You can list all of the facts, statistics, and bits of wisdom you’d like, but it’s probably going to go in one ear and out the other. People crave narratives to make sense of their world. We don’t just want information given to us in clear bullet-points, we want that information to convey a story with a beginning, middle, and end.

While there are comedians who specialize in one-liners and witticisms (Bo Burnham, Anthony Jeselnik), often the best comedians are story-tellers (Dave Chapelle, Bill Burr, Aziz Ansari). They begin their jokes by describing a situation. Then they reveal a conflict with the protagonist (often themselves).

Story-telling is important in any domain where you want to grab an audience’s attention. A teacher may have a bunch of facts that they want their students to remember, but by adding a story to their presentation they can make their material much more sticky and memorable (see How to Plant Powerful Ideas in People’s Minds That Actually Take Root for more on this).

While you may not think of yourself as a natural story-teller, this is something that can definitely be learned with practice. David Nihill gives great tips in his book on how he became a better story-teller, and I’ll be sharing some of those with you right now.

Draw from your own personal experiences

When trying to create a story, you don’t need to start from scratch or recreate an entire universe. Start with what you know best – your own personal experiences.

Most of our memories are already structured in the form of a narrative. There’s a setting, a protagonist (you!), a conflict, and an ending.

One great piece of advice is to start a document on your computer and make a list of memorable stories. These could be centered around a specific presentation you want to give (stories of breakups or stories of failing at a goal), or just stories you think will be interesting or entertaining to share with your audience.

Start by making a list with the general idea behind each story (“That one time a girl threw her drink at me”). Then you can go back to this list and elaborate more on each memory when you have the time (“I was at college at this local bar…all my friends had hooked up with a girl and I was the odd man out…I saw this gorgeous girl dancing and decided to approach her…”).

Having a “story collection” can be very helpful if you are a public speaker. If you don’t already have one, you should start one now. You might have a lot of awesome stories that you don’t know how to integrate into your presentation, but by starting your collection now you will have a wealth of stories on the back-burner, ready for use when you need them.

The best part about focusing on your own personal experiences is that you know your stories will be unique. Also, no one will know your stories better than you so they are typically way easier to remember and share than if you were to try and create an entertaining story out of thin air.

It’s often said that to be a great story-teller, you need to have lived a little. If you’re having trouble thinking of any interesting memories from your past, it may be time to do some adventure-seeking and start creating new stories in your life.

Try new things, go to new places, and meet new people – often the stories will start writing themselves. These are great ways to start building a better “story collection” in your life.

Test your material with friends and family

Every comedian knows that their jokes are rarely “finished” when they are telling them for the first time.

Instead, like most polished stories, it often requires a few new drafts and editing before we settle on the best way to share our material.

This is why comedians like Louis C.K., Jerry Seinfeld, and Aziz Ansari spend a lot of time sharing their new material in small clubs or at open mic nights before they present the material to a larger audience.

Sometimes they will enter a small club with just a vague idea of what they want to talk about. And once they begin “riffing” (or improvising) on that topic, they begin to find what lines get laughs and what lines they are better off getting rid of.

We can practice our own material in a similar way – even if it’s just sharing a story with friends or family. By testing your material in front of a small audience, you’ll soon discover what parts of your story connect with your audience and what parts don’t seem to work.

Like all experiments, this is going to require you becoming more comfortable with failure. You might think you have a great story on your mind, but you end up delivering it in a bad way and no one seems to care. That’s okay! Just try to take what you learned and use that to improve your story the next time you’re telling it.

Over time your stories will become more polished and refined. Eventually you reach a point where you become more comfortable telling the story because you know exactly what lines are going to kill it with your audience.

For extra credit, try filming your presentations whenever possible. This makes it much easier to reevaluate your material when you’re finished and pick apart what works and what doesn’t work.

Practice your material in small and safe ways and try to encourage honest feedback when you can. You’ll soon be ready to take your material to the big stage!

Pay attention to your delivery

You can hear the same exact joke told by two different people and have a completely different reaction to it.

Why? Because delivery matters. If someone says all the right words but doesn’t say it with the right tone, body language, and timing, a good joke can often turn into a bad joke.

Norm MacDonald is a master at this. Often his jokes are completely dry and sometimes even described as “anti-jokes” because they rarely follow a typical joke format. But the way he delivers his material is something that is solely unique to him and he makes it work for his personality (check out a video of his moth joke if you want to get a feel for his style of comedy).

The proper delivery is going to depend on how you present yourself, your material, and your individual personality, but it’s important to remember that your delivery will make a big difference in how well your material comes off to others.

With practice, you’ll discover the best way to deliver your stories. For example, once you know that a particular line is a strong one, you can heighten that line by taking an extra pause before you deliver it (to add suspense and tension before the final release).

You never want to take the punchlines of your story and breeze through them as if they are just another detail. By emphasizing those lines, you not only make them stronger but you also give a cue to your audience that this is the line where you expect a reaction. And they will be more likely to respond to it.

Of course it’s often difficult to monitor your delivery while you’re performing. This again is why it’s important to encourage feedback from others or to record your presentation so you can pay more attention to these subtle details later on.

Start strong and finish even stronger

Now that you have a bunch of good material to share, the next big question is how to organize it.

While Do You Talk Funny? has countless tips and advice on how to fine-tune your public speaking, one of the key pieces I want to focus on is to “start strong and finish even stronger.”

Psychology research shows that people are often programmed to remember the beginning and end of their experiences. The middle parts often become more of a blur.

For example, when psychologists ask individuals to remember a long list of words, they discover that participants are most likely to remember the words at the beginning and end of the list vs. words listed in the middle.

This is just one example of how our memories are biased toward the beginning and end of an experience.

With this in mind, a good public speaker wants to start their presentation strong to make a positive first impression and grip their audience’s attention. But they also want to end their presentation even stronger to leave a lasting impact and give their audience a positive note to remember them afterwards.

In the case of a comedian, David Nihill recommends that you use your second best joke at the very beginning and your best joke at the very end. By structuring your material this way, you are more likely to leave a stronger impression.

Once you’ve created your material and tested it, you should have a good idea of what are the strongest parts of your presentation, and that’ll give you a better idea of the order you should structure it.

Conclusion

I have a lot of respect for standup comedians – it’s something I would love to dabble in to improve my own communication and presentation skills.

When I came across the book Do You Talk Funny? 7 Comedy Habits to Become a Better (and Funnier) Public Speaker, I knew it would be right up my alley and I had to check it out. David Nihill does a really great job taking lessons from the world of standup comedy and showing you how to apply them to any type of public speaking. I highly recommend it!

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