lessons from the frontline of comedy
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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The writer is a comedian, author and host of the podcast ‘How to Own the Room’
Whenever stand-up comedy is mentioned as a career, the first thing anyone says to you — especially if you’re a woman — is this: “You’re so brave.” Comedy is high risk and is associated with heckling, hostility, and rapid, obvious, unmistakable failure.
A monologue with no laughs can be a highly successful and much envied TED talk. But a comedy show with no laughs is an outright disaster.
Perhaps, most of all, comedy requires an intuitive nimbleness: you need to be able to pivot seamlessly from a punchline that failed to land almost as though it was not meant to in the first place. When it comes to recovering from setbacks, comedians have no choice but to become expert at it.
No one knows more about embracing failure, camouflaging it, sitting with it, and turning it around.
Get over yourself
The first lesson in bouncing back after what feels like — and is — a public humiliation? Get over yourself. Sarah Millican, one of the UK’s most successful comedians, is known for Millican’s Law: if you’ve had a bad gig, forget it by 11am the next day and move on.
“Dying” — that telling term for a performance that has gone wrong — is acceptable and inevitable. But you cannot dwell inside the emotion of it indefinitely — it’s too cruel. Cut the drama and self-obsession and just do the work. The “11am” advice is useful in relation to good gigs, too: it is unwise to celebrate or despair too much.
Yes, acknowledge your emotions, be annoyed, kick yourself and bang your head against the wall if you must. But, then, let it go. Similarly, if it goes well, there is no need to get self-congratulatory. Enjoy the moment then move on.
What about failure in the moment when your rhetorical flourish — like a punchline — does not work out? Comedian Cariad Lloyd, actress in sitcom Peep Show and anthology series Inside No. 9, says you need to keep an open mind.
For her, “it’s about understanding that a joke, like a person, can be OK. But it might be in the wrong room, or you’re having a bad day, or the audience might be cold and tired . . . But that doesn’t mean the joke is bad or that you are not good at your job.” By all means, try your clever take another time on another audience — but give up “if it fails more than three times”.
If something is not “landing” with the audience, you also learn to be directive, almost didactic. Comedian Gráinne Maguire, a writer on TV panel shows The Last Leg and 8 Out of 10 Cats, explains: “If you act like you’re having a great time, the audience won’t notice if a joke doesn’t quite work . . . relax!”
Teach people how to treat you
Every audience, whether it’s a thousand people or one, works out how to react by reading your reaction first. Non-stand-up comedian Hillary Clinton offered this tip on my podcast about public speaking: “When you walk into a room, people will take their cue from you.” If you are at ease they will imagine everything is going as planned. If you are panicked and flustered, they will know it has gone wrong. Hold your own. Arrange your face accordingly.
The best way to process both success and failure, especially in the context of a performance or presentation, is to have a routine to follow religiously in the aftermath. Write down three things you did well (so that you cement your good habits) and three things you would change (so that you constantly seek improvement).
To dwell on all the things you did badly is a fool’s errand — and it is simply too big an attack on your self-esteem to be nit-picking the whole time.
Some of the best advice on riding out failure comes from performers with a background in improvisational comedy, a discipline that relies on trust and the ability to experiment: Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, and Mindy Kaling have all written and talked extensively about the value of giving yourself permission to get it wrong. One of the biggest parts of overcoming failure is recognising that nothing in life can ever be “right for everyone” anyway.
In her memoir Bossypants, Fey countered the pointless claim that “women aren’t funny” with an essay about subjectivity: “I don’t like Chinese food, but I don’t write articles trying to prove it doesn’t exist.” Not everyone has to like everything. In fact, it is impossible for everyone to like — or laugh at — everything. Failure is itself a matter of opinion.
A stand-up survival guide
Get comfortable with silence. If you can endure silence with good humour while maintaining control of your emotions, others will sense that comfort and wait for what you have to say next.
Listen harder than you speak. Take your own focus off what you are saying and lean into how it is being received.
Use movement to distract and deflect. If you bombed hard on one side of the stage or speaking area, move to the other side and start over with a new energy.
Never blame the audience. Even when they are awful. Or, at least, don’t tell them you blame them.
Do not expect anything interesting, important or funny to be easy. As the late US comedian Joan Rivers once said: “Listen, I wish I could tell you it gets better. But it doesn’t get better. You get better.” There is no shortcut to that.
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