How Comedians Serve as Story R&D
Want story skills with scientifically proven results? Watch more comedy.
I’ve been doing research for a workshop I’m prepping on how to use humor at work, and something struck me like a pie to the face. When studying humor, you find that most people are more concerned with the mechanics of a joke than preparing the audience. I think this is why people find humor so confounding and get into trouble (this is what I’m focusing on in the workshop), but one thing we get out of that focus is a set of tools that comedians generally agree will make a joke more humorous. You probably already know some of these: the rule of three, callbacks, and the classic Shakespeare quote “Brevity = wit” (which I’m paraphrasing for the sake of brevity).
The thing is, while these tried and tested techniques make jokes more effective, none of these rules, on their own, will make you funny. What they do is make you more rhetorically effective because, as it turns out, they’re applicable to all forms of persuasive storytelling. If you listened to any of the speeches from either of the recent political conventions you may have noticed that the most effective ones used those same techniques I just mentioned (rule of three, callbacks, brevity when making their main point).
The goal of comedy and the goal of a story are much the same, to elicit an emotional response. But for storytellers it’s not always clear whether you’re getting exactly the emotional response that you’re looking for. People might nod their heads, they might clap (are they just being polite?) but you don’t always know if you’ve hit your mark until later on. The reason that comedy is such an effective lab for storytelling research is that the combination of emotions that comedians aim for will, if they’re successful, earn an audible laugh, which makes it easy to quickly identify a positive result. A genuine laugh (usually we can tell the difference between genuine laughter and fake or nervous laughter) lets us know that the comedian was able to effectively connect with their audience on an emotional level, and that we can probably incorporate those techniques in our own persuasive communication.
Occasionally, online, you get to see how a comedian develops one joke over the course of many months (and probably dozens of performances) until it becomes the sharp and effective tool that gets a laugh from their audience. This is their rhetorical R&D lab. They’re trying things out, experimenting, taking in feedback and reworking the whole time so that when they finally arrive at the joke you see on the Netflix special, they know it’s going to kill. When they win, we all win, because, just as the space race led to cordless vacuum cleaners, what comedians learn on the way to a laugh line can be useful to all of us.
If you’re curious about what I’ve discovered through my own story research, check out this mini class and keep an eye out for my longer video class “Craft Your Narrative: Communicating value to get ahead” coming soon.
