What Comedy Taught Me About Comms, Writing, and Life
Late last year, I signed up for a standup comedy class. It was mostly on a whim, something fun and low-stakes to try after I embarked on a sabbatical in October, and only like 2-5% because I thought secretly I had within me the ability to be the next Taylor Tomlinson. While I didn’t end the class with an offer to host a late-night talk show, I found the experience enormously valuable for both my creative work and my work-work. Which is to say: the study of comedy turned out to be the study of how to live well.
1. Quality is about quantity.
I am someone who likes to putter around in my brain endlessly, turning ideas over and over until they feel substantial enough to put into the world. My therapist calls this rumination and charges me $275 a session to fix my anxious, ruminating little brain with worksheets, Math Superstar-style. And my comedy instructor Sara, God bless her, called this bullshit (the ruminating, not the worksheets. Although….).
Comedy is a numbers game. You have to write 50 jokes to find the one gem that’s actually worth honing. So if you’re trying to hone first, joke’s on you—you might find yourself polishing a turd. Comedy is a relational art and you can’t figure out what’s going to land until you try it out on actual humans in the actual world. It is not just hard to figure out what will land well by pinging jokes around in your own brain; it is literally impossible. And you know what’s also a relational art? Comms! Absolutely nothing matters in comms other than getting your point across to your audience, and sometimes you can’t figure out what will land until you experiment a little.
Another way of thinking about this concept is as focusing on the upside rather than trying to mitigate the downside. One of my worst qualities is that I am afraid of looking stupid; I am a downside mitigator. This means in group settings I am often the quiet one who watches the conversation volley back and forth until I am certain I have something both unique and smart-sounding to contribute. I am looking for the one shot I know I can sink rather than riffing to get there and accepting that I might say something stupid and/or obvious along the way. In addition to be a pretty annoying quality in a coworker/comedy partner/conversationalist (since I’m selfishly focused on personal outcomes rather than group outcomes), this habit also prevents me from ever getting to the really good stuff, because the really good stuff is never obviously good in my own head. In fact, the BEST stuff often seems like the WORST stuff when said stuff is zipping around your cranium. This has proven true not only in my comedy but also as I write my novel—I literally cannot guess what ideas are going to fall flat and which are going to sink until I actually write them down.
This is somewhat related to the idea of just getting down a “shitty first draft.” But personally, I never found that advice particularly helpful—I mean, who wants to spend a bunch of time writing something shitty when you could be writing something not-shitty instead? But if you quite literally cannot get to the good stuff without the bad stuff, then your first draft isn’t shitty; it’s just a stop on the way to goodness.
2. Perception is not reality.
Sara required us to record our sets in class. This allowed us to listen back to any improvised riffs so we didn’t forget a joke—but more importantly, to listen back to how the audience reacted. More than once, I found myself thinking about how poorly a set had gone, then went and listened to the recording only to discover that wait, actually, people WERE laughing? Kind of a lot?!
The first few times this happened, my sense of reality shimmered, mirage-like, in front of me. I felt like maybe everything my brain had ever told me was a lie. Had my performance review been better than I remembered? Did that one friend not actually secretly hate me? As someone with clinical anxiety (see: therapist), I KNOW reality and my perception of it often diverge. But knowing something is not the same as believing it. Recording my sets forced me to acknowledge the truth about what was landing and what wasn’t.
3. Find the feedback that resonates and throw away the rest.
Our instructor started the seven-week class by really getting to know each of us: our backgrounds, our voices, and what we wanted to get from the class. Then she tailored her feedback along the way to help us achieve our own goals. In other words, her style was not to mold each of us into versions of her own Platonic comedy ideal, but to help us become the best versions of ourselves. (The class was called Finding Your Voice, so, like, yeah!)
She also told us that we should take the feedback that resonates with us and throw away the rest. This was kind of a radical idea for me, a recovering Very Good Girl. I have historically tried to be all things to all people, to get good grades and attend a good college and embark on a career path that made my parents proud/was interesting at cocktail parties/didn’t involve too much downside risk. In other words, I am the absolute queen of taking feedback from everyone and mashing it into one giant “consensus” oatmeal and then doing the consensus oatmeal-y thing—whether or not it actually resonates with how I want to live my life. (Which, coincidentally, is how I wound up in a job I was not particularly excited by, which led to my taking a sabbatical, which led to me taking a comedy class, which led to me learning why I’d made some of the choices I’d made. Ain’t that poetry!)
Part of the muscle we built in class was to figure out when feedback was helping us get where we wanted to go—and when it wasn’t. It was empowering to be told to literally just ignore feedback that didn’t work for you. It was also scary, because it meant I had to actually know what my goals were outside of “make everyone happy and also no one mad at me.”
As I revise my novel, I’m trying to keep this advice in mind, only letting a few trusted readers take a look at my first draft. Even then, I’ve gotten some feedback that didn’t totally resonate—but I’m finding that the more I listen to my intuition about these things, the more powerfully my intuition glows, so it becomes easier to know what feels right down the line. (Gotta love a virtuous cycle!)
There are also some parallels here to the way I’m listening to feedback as I build my own comms consultancy. Ultimately, I want to build a practice that is exciting to ME, the person who has to do the work, not the business everyone else would build. This should be obvious, but it was not obvious to me initially! I legitimately thought some of my mentors would be like, “Um, if X is what you want to do, why did I ever let you do Y when we worked together?! You’ve taken my investment to zero!!” As opposed to what’s actually been happening, which is people saying, “You ARE really good at X, I’m so glad you’re focusing on that.” And also sometimes, “Here’s some additional advice.” Which I now know how to metabolize responsibly!
4. Do it scared.
I am not a person with much stage presence. I wouldn’t say I’m afraid of public speaking so much as I would say that my only public speaking experience was high-school debate, where I could use a leather padfolio from Staples and copious amounts of research to distract myself from the fact that I was speaking to an audience. (It also helped that the audience was mostly goofy adolescent boys in their brother’s too-big Sears suits.) None of that armor exists in standup (although I did find myself wondering if I could pioneer a new style of standup that was more like “sitdown” and allowed me to repose behind a giant oak desk instead of in front of a mic stand. (Again, it’s remarkable no one has hired me to host a late-night show)).
Sometimes in class, we weren’t even given time to flesh out a few jokes before we were called to the mic to improvise on a topic like “parties” or “vacations” or “hometowns.” I cannot impress upon you, dear reader, how much I disliked getting up to the mic without a single thought in my brain. (For context, I am the kind of person who repeats my order to myself three times before calling room service.) And I am pretty sure the vast majority of my improvised riffs absolutely bombed. (I don’t feel like listening to the recordings to confirm because, despite Sara’s best efforts, I did not attain full ego death in class.) But one of ‘em landed well enough to get molded into a bit for my final five-minute set. And more importantly, I have faith that if I wind up in a situation where I need to riff a little bit, like making small talk while waiting for people to join a Zoom call (a true nightmare), I can.
5. Have an amateur’s mindset.
I think part of the reason I got so much from this class was that I had no expectations going in. I mostly wanted to avoid rotting in bed for my entire sabbatical and also thought it might be healthy to do at least one thing that wasn’t writing the 70,000-word novel upon which it suddenly felt like my entire future hinged. (I thought people would judge me if nothing came of the project I spent two otherwise unemployed months working on, which it turns out isn’t true—most people just think it’s cool I did it! And also, I think something will come of it! But TBD!) And because my baseline for comedy writing was zero, every piece of incremental progress felt really exciting.
The last time I felt this way, all lit up with learnin’, was when I was an intern on the Hillary for America campaign in 2015. I had never been on a campaign before, and my only political experience had been as a White House intern the year before (which of course was also very cool, but in a different, much more buttoned-up way). At first, I didn’t know how to create a press list or run a morning call with the entire national comms team. Every day I was drinking from the firehose; every day I was learning exponentially more than the day before. I was happy to do literally anything and treated it all with equal care: creating name tags for press events, ordering lunch, writing briefings for the Secretary.
And then I progressed in my career. I worked at places that mostly didn’t care about titles, but I still wanted something—a title, a raise—to serve as a “gold star” that I was doing well. I developed a sense of where I “should” be and measured everything against that. (Spoiler: I was always behind, because it turns out being frustrated you aren’t at the next milestone is a little like being mad you’re not at the horizon when you’re driving—that goalpost is going to keep moving as you do.)
I’m trying to get back to that amateur mindset as I build something new for myself professionally. That celebration of the little wins. But it’s really hard! (See: have not yet experienced ego death.) As you get better at something, you only realize how much farther you have to go. I want to focus more on the pleasure of learning and building and less on the future.
I’m now taking a sketch writing course, because apparently I am a glutton for punishment, and I can already feel the judgment creeping in, the feeling that I should be smarter and funnier, that I should already know this stuff. But fuck that—let’s take it back to zero.