First Time Facilitator podcast: Transcript (Episode 5)
Episode 5 transcript: How to use humour to deliver x-factor presentations (and laughs) with Andrew Tarvin
Leanne: So excited to have you on the show. I heard your story on Chris Guillebeau's Side Hustle School podcast. and thought your story was fascinating. I’d love to start with that story. Your job title is Humour Engineer. Tell us about yourself and how you ended up with that title?
Andrew: Yes. So, for people that are surprised by that title, it didn't exist before I made it up. As far as I know, I’m the leading humour engineer in the world because I'm the only one. But it is basically an intersection of my background. I have a degree in Computer Science and Engineering and I've always been an engineer, I've always been obsessed with efficiency.
I went to the Ohio State University here in the states and started working at Procter & Gamble as an IT Project Manager after I graduated. When I was at P&G, I started to realise that there was a difference between being efficient and being effective. I was always obsessed with how I get the most results with the minimum amount of work. And I realise that you can't be efficient with humans because humans have emotions and feelings and they get sick and tired and all these other things that robots and computers don’t get.
I didn't really have the skills that I needed to be effective with humans. You have to be effective and so, luckily for me in college I started doing Improv and stand-up comedy. My best friend wanted to start in Improv comedy group. They needed people and they forced me to join. I realised that the same skills that I was learning to be effective as an improviser on stage, were actually the same skills that were helping me to be more effective with my teams. I started to explore the intersection of humour in the workplace with business and ultimately ended up building g a company that was my side hustle for a while until it became my full-time job and that's why what I do falls under the category of Humour Engineer if that makes sense.
Leanne: Yeah, it does. I'm interested in hearing about this Improv school. I did improv in high school and it's pretty scary. Was it easy for you or did it take you a few months to really get in to your groove?
Andrew: For sure, it took me sometime - when we first started we were not very good. We had no formal training, we’re just some college kids. A couple of people in the group had a little bit of improvising experience from watching ‘Whose Line is it Anyway?” and we tried to copy what we saw. I was never the class clown or the life of the party type person. I’m an introvert. In my senior year in high school, I was voted as “Teacher's Pet."
Leanne: Wow!
Andrew: I was very much on the academic side. When I first started on a new crowd, I was nervous the entire day before the show, to the point that, like I couldn’t eat anything and then after a few shows, after some practice I couldn’t eat for the entire half-day. Then, I ate in the morning, but not in the afternoon. And the same thing with stand up - it became a process which I learned, where I was constantly nervous, but as I got better and better, I became more and more comfortable with it.
Leanne: So, you sort of, introducing what you’re doing outside of work into your workplace. When you started incorporating humour, what was it that you were bringing in to a meeting? What were you noticing with people in the meeting - was there great response first up, or were people a bit confused or shocked, thinking, “Hey, this isn’t the way we operate in corporate America?!”
Andrew: Yeah. I mean, I do think people were a little bit surprised with the way I introduced humour. For meetings, I would start every meeting as a project manager like with an interesting question, a simple question like, “Go around the room and answer, what’s the first thing you remember buying with your own money?”, or “What is something true for you that you don’t think it’s true for anyone else in this room?”
What we found out was that as we get to know each other more as humans, we started to have better team dynamics, we started to respect each other more. The thing is, that when we think of humans as resources, it’s simply resources of people who are going to work for us. We forget that they are humans and that sometimes they may be a little bit late getting back to you - not because they secretly hate you but because they have a sick child at home, or they’ve been going through some extreme challenges; or work is really stressful for them. By bringing back the human element into the meetings, it helped us improve our relationships.
With my own presentations, I started to add a little bit of humour, adding more images. I remember reading one of those trivia things that said Alfred Hitchcock would put himself in almost every single one of his movies - even if he was like just in the background or silhouette, or something. I thought that sounded cool so decided I was going to start doing that in my presentations.
Leanne: [laughter]
Andrew: Some of them were obvious, and some of them were hidden. It became kind of a game for the people in my meeting to see, okay, when is the picture of Andrew going to show up? Small things like that. There was never a thing that was too extreme and I think people started to open up more. People started to actually attend to my meetings because they knew that it was going to be fun and engaging. I got positive feedback from people saying, hey I just want to let you know that I really enjoy coming to your meeting. I enjoy the humour that you use. I’ve even started to use humour in my meetings as well.
Leanne: Wow! That’s a great knock-on effect, I mean that’s how you create a positive company culture, by starting something organically like that. Well done!
Andrew: Yeah! And I just kind of built on that because one of the things that I think is important about when I’m working with organisations, I’m talking to them as individuals. You decide every single day on how you approach your day, so, you know you can make the choice to use humour. I kind of likened to Zombie Apocalypse, right? That change is kind of like the Zombie Apocalypse. It starts with a patient zero, a single person with a disease or hopefully more likely a good idea.
When that goes out, that spreads to a couple of people that they interact with, then it spreads to a couple of more. Ultimately you change the entire culture, but it comes from individuals’ choices that they make.
Leanne: Yeah. I think that’s really empowering to people at all levels in an organisation that this is in your circle of control and influence. When you started including images in your presentation the first time, was it very obvious or did people pick it out - they started to notice this pattern?
Andrew: Yes, it was. I mean, the first picture of me was very obvious. I think it was a picture of me as a kid - and that's one of the ways to immediately I feel like you’re almost getting an audience on your side.
If you show a picture of you, either as an adorable child or a Wonder Years type of photo (where it’s like I can’t believe that my mom let me go to school like this )– it immediately creates a little bit of a human bond because everyone has those cute photos. The first couple were kind of like that and then people start to pick up like, wait a minute there’s one in every single of one of these presentation.
Leanne: [laughter]
Andrew: And that's where it became fun.
Leanne: Were people in your organisation responding to these challenges and starting to innovate their presentations because they saw the results? Or were there people, still saying ‘No, I don't have time for this. I’m just going to stick to the traditional method and throw a bunch of texts onto my power point slides?’.
Andrew: Yeah. I mean there are some people who will stick to the way they've always learned it. I’m really talking about effectiveness. My training company is a training company in human effectiveness and you recognise that, yes, creating a presentation that has more images adds a little bit of humour isn’t as efficient - but it is more a lot effective. As someone wanting to get results,as an engineer, that's what I'm all about, solving problems and getting results, I’m willing to take a little bit more time to do it so, that in the long run I’m actually saving time.
Leanne: Sure.
Andrew: Because if I go into a meeting and I use a little bit of humour, and I get people to pay attention and they actually remember the message, that means I don’t have to send as many follow-up emails. It doesn’t mean that I have to do another presentation where I give basically the exact same talk, and for me, think over the long run, I actually save a lot more time because I am being more effective rather than focusing more on efficiency.
Leanne: So in these workshops that you run relating to human effectiveness - what kind of strategies do you teach people?
Andrew: Well, I have to start with the why. You have to understand you know the “why” in terms of what you are working for and the results you want. When I want to talk about humour I use ‘MAP’ and that stands for your Medium, Audience and Purpose.
Leanne: Nice.
Andrew: Medium is all about how you are going to execute your humour - is it in your email or your presentation? A is for Audience - who is your audience? What do they know, what do they need, what do they expect and what is your relationship to them? Because your relation to them dictates the type of humour that you can use.
You recognise the humour, that you can get away with a good friend is different from the humour you can get away with someone you just met for the first time. And then finally and most importantly is the Purpose. What is your reason for using humour?
I don’t teach humour just because it’s fun. It’s nice that it's fun. But I teach you because it works. So, are you trying to use humour because you want to get people to pay attention or are you using it so they'll remember something longer? Are you using it so that you'll build a better relationship with them or that you help them solve problems more effectively, like what is that specific goal you are going for? From there you can pick the right style. That’s what I teach - that’s the key to effectiveness… because it doesn’t matter how fast you run, if at the start of a race, you run in a wrong direction.
Leanne: Yeah. Absolutely! I really like that acronym MAP. That’s easy to remember - I the Medium, Audience and Purpose. How do you end up choosing your medium - does it relate to your personal brand, or is it like, okay here are some funny images, a cat meme always gets a laugh; or do you refer back to the person who's presenting to figure out their strategies?
Andrew: I give some recommendations based on some different styles for different purposes, different reasons, but yeah it ultimately comes down to you and your sense of humour. Your sense of humour is your ability to appreciate humour and what you find funny… that dictates your skill of humour because that’s what you are going to talk about.
For me, I love puns, so, I started to introduce humour pretty early on at P&G at the end of every single of my weekly status update meeting e-mails, I would send a couple of puns based on the subject matter.
And a lot of times, I would get e-mails back that were like, “Hey, this was a good pun”, or a lot of time they were, “Hey, this is a terrible joke”, kind of like in a playful way, but what they told me was that people were actually opening my e-mail. And scrolling until the bottom of it to see the pun.
Leanne: Yeah.
Andrew: And that’s for me because I love puns, but if you are not a very good joke teller, but you are pretty good at telling stories then you would probably tell more stories
Another thing that I talk about is that you don’t really have to be the creator of humour. You can be the shepherd of humour. You can find interesting pictures and as long as you, you use Creative Commons, you can put them in your presentation. Or, if you find a TED talk that you like, then you can share that out with people; or if you listen to this podcast and you think it is great, and you want your team to start to embracing humour a little bit more, share this podcast with them.
You know, there's a lot of things that you can do to get started. It’s a balance of what is your sense of humour, your style, and also some strategies that maybe work really effectively for or getting people paying attention.
Leanne: Yeah, that’s really cool. We do something called a pre-start talk and that’s when the leader gets up the front of a room and talks about what’s happening that day, assigning people tasks that sort of thing. I sort of liken it to the pre-flight safety briefing in terms of,, it's kind of like ground hog day. So something like this, bringing a joke, showing a funny image, whatever it is can mix it up.
In your example, we mentioned that at the end of your email, you wrote a pun. I’m also going to ask you a question about the online learning environment. Sometimes, it might be easier when you're face to face in a workshop to introduce them but I guess that’s one strategy that would work online when running online training. Is there anything else you can incorporate online?
Andrew: Absolutely! Well, yes, I think one thing I just want to touch upon the idea of what you said in these pre-start meetings. One of the viable things about consistently using humour is that it changes people's expectations and their behaviour in a good way.
When I started using humour in meetings, people would actually want to come to my meeting because they knew they are going to be more fun. When I started using humour in my emails, people are wanting to read my emails because they knew they are going to have a little bit more fun.
And so, if you take something that people have to go to, and then add your own style to this pre-start meeting, what it’s going to do is to change people behaviour to actually look forward to the meetings. That's part of the value of incorporating humour consistently and it changes perception and engagement long term. I think that is a great example of an area where humour is to be added.
Jumping over to online learning - certainly, puns work. A lot of times in online learning you try to listen to someone and it's easy to alt tab into a different program, or kind of daydream or look at something else…But if you have images that are interesting, you are going to stick to the screen itself because you want to see what other interesting image comes up.
If your goal is to help people remember something longer, then that’s a great opportunity for an association, connecting whatever it is that you are training to something else that is interesting. For example, when I was at P&G, I was tasked with teaching a three day project management course in three hours for interns. And so, with that I wanted to create an association and ultimately decided to associate project management with a wedding. If you understand the basic set up of wedding, then you can have basic understanding of project management (so, the engagement is like the project charter and the parents are like the stakeholders).
And there's a schedule, there is a budget and the vows are like the scope of what you're talking about and then we would also end with a joke that fifty percent of both marriages and projects fail.
Leanne: Yeah, I see. That’s clever. So, you talked about condensing this three day workshop into three hours. In your book, you list five hundred one strategies to use humour in the workplace. I’m interested to hear which one item has received the most feedback, or maybe it’s been controversial.
Andrew: I think one that people really like but it’s hard for them to grasp is related to subject lines - probably email because we spend too much in email.
One way you can encourage people to use it, is to use humour in the subject line, so, I think people are really interested in that but it’s a little bit of a challenge. Think of a normal subject line that you are going to use and then pick one or two words and find a unique and interesting way to say those words.
I think that's one that I've gotten more clear on - I do suggest that if you are going to read e-mail and you're starting to get bored suggest start reading the different e-mails with a different accent in your head.
Leanne: Awesome. I'm actually going to work a little later today so, I'm going to use an interesting subject title and see what the reaction is!Andrew: Yeah, the key to this is to start. The reality is that humour is a skill and that means it can be learned. I know that because I'm someone who's had to learn how to use it. It really starts in with the choice in trying things out - trying a handful of things that are within your comfort zone.
Maybe it is like you said, just an email or maybe it’s just listening to a comedy podcast on your way home to relieve some stress. It starts small but then as you start to think about it more and you see more opportunities it starts to become more second nature and you start to add it and so, it doesn't feel like you have to do as much prep time for executing some of these in your ideas.
Leanne: Yeah, that's what I love it sounds like I can implement it immediately and I can send you some feedback if I get any interesting responses. What comedy podcasts do you recommend if any?
Andrew: It kind of depends on your style, there's a plenty that are talking about comedy and how people create top comedies. The Mark Maron podcast has a lot of comedians on and they end up talking a little bit about their process and how they create comedy.
Comedy Bang Bang is more of the kind of sketches very, very popular with people in a good way to listen and there's certain personalities - I think if you start to study a little bit more, you can start to pick-up on things that can help you to be more comedic yourself.
Leanne: Yes, you do believe there's really strong parallel with being a comedian and also facilitating a workshop?
Andrew: I think so, I mean I still do stand up to prepare for speaking events because I think that stand up would be one of the hardest form of public speaker I'll ever do.
My thought is just like an athlete goes into a weight room and stresses his muscle far beyond what they're going to actually use in their sport- it's the same way with joining in. Stand up is like that, if you get comfortable doing that or get comfortable doing improv -doing a presentation where you have slides behind you and the expectation is not to be funny becomes a lot easier.
Leanne: Yeah, for sure, oh I can't even imagine getting up on a stand-up stage, that's huge. Talking about big moments on stage, you delivered a TEDx speech at a Ohio State university. I was flying back from Sydney the other day and I was watching it in the airport and just laughing- it was really funny. When preparing that speech, how much time did you put into actually getting that all together and memorising it, it's about 20 minutes long, how much time did you give yourself to do that?
Andrew: Typically, that one is a little bit hard to remember because it's a little bit further back - I also did a new TEDx speech last year which is a little bit more present in my mind.
Typically, you get a four month lead time where you get selected as a speaker. The thing that I realise for me is that I joke that I don't procrastinate but I don't do something until I have to Parkinson's law [inaudible].
So, four months leading up to knowing that I was going to do this talk, I booked myself for stand-up shows and worked on jokes in different ideas of what I was going to tell, explore the idea.
I started to book in with friends. I would say, “Hey can I come in and talk to your team about the skill of humour so, that I can practice?” I don't know the actual number of hours that I put into it but it's definitely, I think at least 5 or 6 run throughs of the 20 minute version of the talk with private groups just to get feedback; and then I did a bunch of other stand up shows to get there.
TedX is a very specific environment where if you're doing that -that's probably going to be more rehearsed in almost any other thing that you're going to do.
Maybe the first time when you're first creating your first draft, you write it all out and then as you write it out, go back and there are certain things you can look for to add humour to it.
So, anytime that you have a list you can look into turning that into a comic triple. Every time you express an emotion you might give kind of allegory for another time that you might experience that emotion in a funny way.
Anytime you're teaching a point you might use an association.
After you have that draft you can build it into bullet points. As stand-up comedians we call them a set list and you have a name for each piece of your bit and then you practice it -not worrying about getting things right or wrong but just about getting the overall ideas across.
When it comes to a presentation the only time that an audience knows you messed up is if you tell them you messed up. If you kind of skip something you can bring it back a little bit later, or you can decide to ignore it completely. I get the best performance right now in this moment based on how well I prepared.
Leanne: I heard a lot of people say that it’s really important to over rehearse so when you deliver it comes across very natural - which sounds counterintuitive but I delivered a similar type of speech (it was only five minutes) last year and I over-rehearsed. It came out effortlessly so, yeah, that's really good advice.
Andrew: Seinfeld talks about it - he says that when he's learning his material he wants to be so rehearsed, so that if someone's slapping him in the face he would still be able to perform. That’s a bit extreme for me but I like to think of the same thing - that I should be able to do a basic task like work on my speech when I’m running or washing the dishes… simple task s where you're kind of slightly distracted are great times to actually work on your presentation.
Leanne: Interestingly you talk about writing your script and bullet-points and then thinking about associations. Do they come to you in a moment, or do you you sort of think about it in the shower one night - do these associations come to you at times when you least expect it?
Andrew: It's a little bit of both. If you want to be a comedian or if you want to learn from comedian, there's a couple of things that all comedians do.
Number one, just about every comedian (unless they have a fantastic memory) has a humour notebook. That might be a physical notebook or it might be Evernote on your phone, or the notes app…but they have something where- when they're in the shower, or when they're walking along they have this idea. And so, then they write it down, right? You write that down in your notebook.
Then when you want to explore some humour or working on this piece from my talk or I want to tell a story, then you into your humour notebook and that gives you your inspiration, gives you ideas to play with.
The second thing that comedians do is that they write a lot. Within comedy we say there's something called the rule of 90 which is that 90% of what you write is going to be crap only 10% is really going to be the stuff that's really, really good that's going to get laughs on stage.
I tweet almost every day- a pun or one line, just to force myself to get stuff out there and usually at the end of the year I go back and look at all the tweets that I had and what are the best engagement -what had the most re-tweets and I will sometimes use those in stand up, or I find ways to use that as speaking engagement and stuff like that.
The difference between a professional and an amateur is that a professional is able to work even when they don't feel inspired. The way that you do that is by giving yourself structure by doing certain exercises and then giving yourself forms of inspiration like, ideas that you've captured in your notebook.
Leanne: Yeah. I guess by doing that tweet a day you’re sort of developing a discipline and a habit so, at the end of the year you got 365 puns a day - you could probably sell one of those daily calendars! How do you even think of a pun a day, do you sort of batch it on the weekend, or do you actually just every day get inspired by something that's going on?
Andrew: It depends on the week and I do a little bit both. As you start writing humour you start to see the humour in more places. As you start to do storytelling you start to realise, Oh, wait this random experience at the grocery store could actually be a pretty interesting story.
I don't know if it's actually good or not but I put this one up 30 minutes ago - my mom sent me an article about the ten most confusing emoticon or emojis and so, when I was thinking of a tweet for the day I was like, oh what's related to emojis? What's something that I could say about emojis? So, I started to explore and then my thought for the day- I don't know if it's good or not is that, is that people make fun of emojis but the truth is that they introduced emotions to a whole school of engineers had to program them in.
Leanne: [laughs] That's good, yes, I like that one. [laughs]
Andrew: Right and so, that's just me -that's a process from the day- it's what happens in my life that I can kind of look back on and explore to see if there's anything interesting to talk about.
Leanne: Oh, love it yeah, really great tips and I think as presenters and facilitators, we know that stories really help in terms of reinforcing a message but it's hard to sort of look back on moments in your life and think of that moment to reinforce a point. So having that notepad and taking notes of everyday things, can really help - in maybe three or six months time you think, well that could actually be useful in demonstrating this points. It is a much easier process for sure.
Andrew: The hardest way to add humour is to sit down and be like, alright let’s try to be funny. It’s much easier to look at existing content and then look for triggers. It’s easier to go in that direction with something funny and making it relevant than it is to come up with something scratch.
Leanne: Yeah, for sure and on that note - what is the best advice that you could offer someone that's turning from a technical expert and they want to start sharing their knowledge with others- they want to be a first-time facilitator. What would you tell them?
Andrew: I would say that certainly taking Improv classes is usually beneficial in facilitation, right? Because facilitating is different than speaking in that sense- speaking is a little bit more like stand up; Facilitating a little more like improv.
The beautiful thing about taking an improv class is that you get to practice these skills in a safe environment where the stakes are incredibly low. You don't want to read about facilitation and go facilitate your first workshop with someone, where the stakes are higher.
Leanne: I think it's about getting comfortable with being uncomfortable because I know when I deliver workshops this times the content in the audience so, it's pretty easy but then other times where one of those things will change, the nerves sort of creep back in again. Do you ever get nervous delivering anymore?
Andrew: I get nervous every now and then so, I just did a talk in Baltimore. There's an organisation here in the US called The National Speakers Association. There’s a conference on the Future of Speech which is like, what do we see speaking being looking like in ten years .
I gave a talk that was a very different that my traditional style - I wanted to show and not tell and so, I did a scene with someone else acting as a voice assistant; basically what I think content creation would be like in the future with creative machines. I was nervous for that because there was a different style of presentation and it went really, really well. A bunch of people came up to me afterward and like, you need to invent what this thing that you're talking about because I want to use it, I want the structured creative process that I can go back and forth with the machine to help me be more creative.
I've done over a thousand shows now between stand up and improv and over 500 events, so I need to trust my ability to react and perform.
Leanne: Oh great so, apart from that the voices assistant project what else are you working on?
Andrew: I'm continuing to build out training programs so, with my training company ‘Humor That Works’, the focus is on building out workshops that target very specific problems. What we're doing now with our workshops is working with smaller teams, 10 to 30 people on a specific challenge that they have - so, there's a stress management workshop there is a presentation workshop and there's a job satisfaction workshop =, I’m focusing more on keynotes to speaking and building up some creative tools that help people solve these problems. This is what I love about engineers is that it actually gets results and so, I want to help people to not only embrace and have more fun at work but for them to get better results for doing it.
Leanne: Yeah and we'd love to have you or whatever you preach, Down Under! I think your humour really relates to the people in Australia, so it would be great to have you here sometime.
Andrew: Yeah we'll have to make it work. I've been to all 50 states I want to do all the continents and so, I got to get there at some point.
Leanne: Awesome. It'd be so good to see you down here. Thank you so much for all your advice and I think the best thing about this conversation is that I could list at least 5 practical things to implement straight away. Finally, where can people find you?
Andrew: If you're a fan of puns you can follow me on Twitter, if you like more image-based stuff you can follow me on Instagram- all of my social media is @drewtarvin so, you can also follow me on Facebook, Drew Tarvin,
I have a newsletter through Humor That Works, where we share something related to humour every Friday. They can also find more either on specifically the humour site humorthatworks.com or more about me at Andrewtarvin.com
Leanne: Wonderful. Thank you so, much for your time, Andrew! Learned a lot.