How to be funny

Push CEO, Johnny Rich, shares a few tips on how to be funny.

​When Push trains our presenters, we talk a lot about engagement. However brilliantly expert your content is, if you can’t get a roomful of teenagers to want to listen at 9am on a wet Monday, it might as well be just noise.
 
Making your audience laugh is a powerful way to get that engagement, which is one of the reasons so many of Push’s presenters also work as stand-up comedians. We recruit people with those skills and help them develop them.
 
Over the years, we’ve learned a lot about how to build comedy into our presentations, so we thought we’d share some of the tips we give our presenters. We hope they help you engage your audiences too – whoever you may be speaking to.
 
Anecdotes: Storytelling is a deep human instinct for entertaining, informing and teaching an audience. You can think of comedy stories as anecdotes. The moment you reframe a story as an anecdote, it can help you think of it as somewhere that humour can be found. 
 
Start from somewhere unpredictable: If you’re telling an anecdote about going on holiday, don’t necessarily go for the obvious place to start (usually chronological telling).
 
Perhaps instead you might start with a humorous character. “I have this friend called Carlos. He has a big bushy, black moustache and wears Hawaiian shirts and likes to raise an eyebrow and nod like this as he talks. Carlos isn’t his real name. His real name’s Charles and he comes from Guilford, but we all call him Carlos. Anyway, Carlos, me and a group of friends all went on a holiday…” There will be humour that goes along with the character-revealing behaviours of this person. 
 
Or you can start from the end (or nearly the end) of the anecdote: “Let me tell you about the time I was attacked by a shark – well, nearly attacked by a shark – but was accidentally saved by my friend Carlos because he’d forgotten his swimming trunks”. Again, there will be humour in the inevitable passage of the anecdote as it heads to that anticipated point.
 
Go to the absurd: Carlos doesn’t need to exist. It can be a story about your friend Charlie and you just invent the rest of the detail to add colour.
 
Don’t hold back on the colour you add: the first bits might need to be credible, but you can quickly go into the absurd, especially with metaphors/similes: “His moustache is the weirdest thing, like a mutant furry caterpillar on a quest to escape from his nose into his ears”. Ridiculous similes are a rich vein of humour. (Think of Blackadder: “It’s a plan so cunning you could pin a tail on it and call it a weasel.”) 
 
Act it out: If you rely on words alone, it’s rarely as funny as putting your whole self into it. If you use movement, facial expressions gestures and voices, if you play on emotions and even actually act out the scene around the stage, it gets funnier. And don’t hold back. If you lack inhibitions about bringing the funny, your audience will invest in it too. If they sense the slightest embarrassment from you, they’ll cringe for you.
 
Wordplay: Puns, gags and ol’ fashioned jokes can work for some people. Often they will get a groan, not a laugh, but that’s (almost) as much of a sign of people enjoying it. Be prepared to have a line to deal with the groan.  
 
Punchlines: So many funny stories and jokes fall down because there’s no punchline. The story sort of ends without the laughter cue. That’s the way to think of a punchline: a cue to laugh, rather than the climax or funniest part of the story.
 
It’s often more about rhythm and cadence than it is about actually that is intrinsically funny. Watching improv reveals quite how much this is true. It’s quite rare that punchlines in improv are actually funny. More usually they’re lowest common denominator stuff, a cheesy pun, a pratfall or even, quite literally, a punch.
 
The Carlos story, for example, whatever it might be, might simply end with “That’s Carlos for you”. I’m not saying that's a great punchline. It’s not. But it shows that the story is over and, with the right delivery, it’s a laughter cue. A better punchline may be to play with expectations (confounding or confirming them – see below): “…and that’s why Carlos never wears flip flops.” 
 
Playing with expectations: Arguably, there are only two kinds of jokes: those where what’s funny about the pay-off is that it confounds your expectations and those where it confirms them.
 
Absurdist humour will confound expectations, often in a ridiculous way: I walked into the kitchen and saw a traffic cone, half a kebab and a policeman’s helmet. [Beat] With a policeman underneath it. (Note the rule of three at work there too.) 
 
The humour where your expectations are confirmed are more varied because they can be met in the worst way imaginable (for example, most of David Brent in The Office) or where your audience gets to the punchline a split second before you and then you deliver the very thought they just realised was funny before they would have even had a chance to articulate it. This makes you look quick and witty and it makes them feel clever because they could see where you were going. The secret to those jokes is timing. 
 
The callback: Going back to something you said earlier, but in a new context makes your audience feel in-the-know. You are playing on group-think and togetherness and using that bonding instinct to create an ‘in-joke’. Call-backs in and of themselves may not be all that funny, but they’re great for creating that sense of mutual enjoyment.  
 
Rhythm: I mentioned this with respect to punchlines, but it’s true of the whole story: exaggerated rhythms (varying pace and volume far more than you would if you were talking normally) make a story funnier. Look at any successful stand-up: the rhythm of their delivery – whether telling a story or delivering a punchline – will be integral to what makes it funny. A lot of the time, if you wrote down what they said, it would lose all its funniness. It’s the rhythm that teases the audience along. 
 
Finally, humour is deeply personal. What cracks one person up, falls flat with someone else. It’s more than personal. It’s momentary. The same person will laugh or not depending on their mood. It’s also less than personal. What may not be funny to an individual, may suddenly become funny in front of an audience where laughter becomes infectious and self-affirming. But audiences have moods and moments too. The same group mentality that may help something become funny may also crush that lift-off.
 
You can deconstruct humour and hone the skills. You can practise and perfect. That will always maximise the effectiveness of your comedy. But there will be times it just doesn’t land.
 
In the world of stand-ups, that’s called ‘dying’. In the world of Push presentations, we’re luckier. We are not being measured on our laughs per minute. Even if the score is zero, we may nevertheless have succeeded in being engaging by aiming for entertainment as well as expertise. And, of course, the expertise is the message at the heart of it all.

Picture: Ludo Poire @unsplash