What a Stand-Up Comedy Heckler Taught Me About Selling

It was the Thursday before a bank holiday weekend, a good few years back now. Dirty Dicks, Liverpool Street, a centuries old pub that looked more like the inside of a pirate ship than the venue for a stand-up comedy night.

The room was already loud and mostly full before I walked on stage as the MC, to kick off the show.

Early on, one of the acts came off stage to something ugly shouted from a table near the front. I came back on and did what I'd done a hundred times before with anyone trying to disrupt a show. Singled him out. Mocked him and sealed the deal by inviting his companions to condemn him and subtly separate themselves from him.

Job done. Or so I thought.

What I hadn't clocked was that the heckler had roughly twenty more friends in the room, scattered across four or five other tables, not sat with him, not obviously with him at all. For the next while it stopped being single heckler management and became something closer to a multi-front battle in the form of verbal whack-a-mole. Put one down, another pops up three tables over, a different face, a different angle, no pause between them to catch my breath.

The phenomenon wasn’t just diverting the show; it was becoming the show. An MC must strive to keep the mood playful, the acts protected and the show running on track and on time.

It became pure us against them, and the us were a room full of decent people having a good time who loudly backed me, booed them. I wasn't fighting a heckler by that point. I was selling the room on siding with me to save their own evening.

Ultimately, by drawing on every trick in my back pocket and a few quality improvisations (even if I say so myself), the room energetically turned on the original mouth-breather and on every friend of his who'd piped up trying to back him.

Curiously, while I never encourage hecklers who simply interrupt the craft of comedians, it all made for an even better night, more memorable. No audience gets that kind of spectacle and energy through a screen. Truly live. Entirely alive.

A warm and portly man came over once the show wrapped. Sharply suited, clearly working in finance, probably somewhere on a trading floor a short walk from where we were stood. He said something to the effect that anybody who could stay that composed against that many people, keep the room laughing, and still be selling the mood of the whole night by the end of it, was someone who could sell anything.

He asked if I'd be interested in a conversation about a job.

I said no. Not because the compliment wasn't genuine. It clearly was. But because I wasn't looking for a job in finance. I called what I was building the We Are Funny Project for a reason, and the operative word was 'Funny.'

'Project' was the critical word choice too.

It was always a project. It was always going to end up somewhere well beyond running live comedy shows and giving grassroots acts their stage time, even if I couldn't have told you exactly where it would go, on that Thursday night.

I've never been a comedian, not in the way people usually mean it. I was the promoter and the MC, which meant more stage time across an evening than anyone except the headliner.

At the time I was running four shows a week at Dirty Dicks alone and six a week across London, giving more stage time to open mic acts than anyone else in the country. Plus lots of spots for the pros and semi-pros stepping into headline slots.

I wrote topical jokes before most shows, tested them, cut what didn't earn its place, kept a running joke memory for the better part of fifteen years the way some people keep a diary.

That's worth being precise about, because "comedy skills for business" gets misheard easily. People picture improv games and trust falls, visions of forced funny and fake-laughing. That isn't even close to what I do.

I don't aim to teach anyone to be funny, not in a single day in a conference room. That's a different skill with a much longer time horizon. What I can do, reliably, is show almost anyone how to be a little funnier than they were yesterday. The transferable skills from stand-up run far beyond learning to be funny.

Underneath that headline skill sit a dozen smaller ones. Managing your own nerves. Finding a premise and working it up, then editing it down until only the strongest version survives. Rehearsing until it sounds unrehearsed.

On the night itself, it's establishing rapport fast, setting your status and persona from the first line, opening with a hook instead of a run-up, and reading a room while you're still talking to it.

And, of course, the old showbiz adage often applies, 'Leave them wanting more.' 

Back to the chunky boss-man in the suit. Only a little of what he witnessed was purely improvised. He'd watched me hold a room, lean on prepared spontaneity, repeatedly adjust a plan in real time once the plan had stopped working, and keep developing new lines against fresh objections without losing the upbeat mood or the thread of the gig.

A great comedian, who had previously worked in sales, once told me, "My set up is the offer. The punchline is the close. If they laugh, then the deal is done, to everyone's satisfaction. If they don't laugh, it's an objection. So I need to pivot, work harder, try again."

Worth admitting though, since I'd rather be honest about it than let the story sound too effortless: an MC works from a bag of tricks. Often leaning on prepared spontaneity, whether warmly chatting with the crowd or using lines that sound invented on the spot but have been road-tested for years. A back pocket of steadily escalating put-downs is another.

Here's a gentler version of the classic put-down, offered to someone shouting out at a gig, "You know this is my job? I don't come to your place of work and tell you how to hold your mop, do I?"

And there are genuinely unique ripostes, Steve Martin's reply to a heckler shouting something dumb, "Aah, I remember my first beer."

The brilliant Harry Hill, faced with something very rude yelled at him, came back with, "That may be so, sir, but at least when I get home there'll be a freshly roasted chicken waiting for me."

Original is wonderful. Prepared is powerful. Which is where the Confident Client Engagement and Developing Stronger Ideas workshops deliver the tips, tricks and transferable techniques.

Charles Gruner, professor of speech communication at the University of Georgia, spent his career studying what humour actually does to an audience, and the honest finding isn't the one most speaker training assumes. Humour barely moves how much information a room retains. What it moves, reliably, is how the room rates the speaker. Gruner's studies found audiences consistently rated a speaker higher on character once a joke had landed, and in duller material, higher on authority too.

Barely any audience member at Dirty Dicks that night left remembering much of what I said. I named every act up onto the stage and off it again. I named the headliner more than once. I folded a few real opinions into the jokes along the way. But nobody left carrying facts. They left carrying the experience. They remembered how I held the room, while several people tried to take it off me. How they felt during the skirmishes and beyond.

Reading a room accurately isn't a talent some people are born with and others simply lack. Jeremy Yip and Rod Martin, psychology researchers whose work on humour and social competence is widely cited, found that how well someone manages their own emotions under pressure links to the type of humour they reach for in that moment, self-enhancing and cheerful rather than aggressive or defensive, though which one suits the room depends on who's holding the mic.

Frankie Boyle and Mr Tumble are not selling the same energy, and neither should be trying to. The comedians who prosper are the ones who can read a room in real time and adjust. So are the client-facing teams who last.

Researchers at Wharton and Harvard Business Schools, named Bitterly, Brooks and Schweitzer, found that successfully landing a joke increases a person's status in both new and existing relationships, because it signals confidence and competence at the same time.

Brooks put it plainly to the Harvard Gazette: taking the risk of telling a joke gets read as a powerful signal of confidence. Schweitzer went further, arguing humour should be trained the same way any other business skill gets trained, alongside a spreadsheet or a negotiation.

An element that is simultaneously under-appreciated and delightful is that landing the joke isn't the only way to earn the credit. A colleague who hears a decent joke and reacts accordingly, you know, chuckles or laughs, walks away with nearly as much social capital as the one who uttered the joke in the first place. It's a small exchange between two people that is doing real work, bonding, tension release, a small vote of confidence in each other that adds up over time into genuine resilience.

I'll be frank about that night at Dirty Dicks rather than tidy it up. I felt entirely confident dealing with the first heckler. I'd handled plenty before, and what he'd said was bad enough that the room was highly likely to back me. What actually rattled me was realising he had backup, spread quietly around several tables, and that they weren't folding quickly.

That's where my composure got truly tested, not at the start. Extensive academic research has concluded that the visible skill of looking assured might be closer to the trainable part than actually feeling assured ever is. There are real techniques comedians use to manage nerves before they even reach the mic, and most of them transfer directly into business.

Dr Peter McGraw is a professor of Marketing and Psychology at the University of Colorado Boulder. He spent two years working on his book, The Humour Code, highlighting his conclusion of 'benign violation'. His follow-up book, Shtick to Business, applies his conclusions directly to the workplace. 

My own concept, one of many, drawn from extremely close observation of more live comedy than 99.9% of the population, is simpler to state than it is to pull off. Surprise is key. Stronger if delivered with evocative language/imagery. (Anyone who claims to know the single recipe for being funny is deluded, a liar, or a deluded liar.)

In these deliciously lean jokes we just don't see the twist coming. Which is one of my points. Surprise delights and engages. Laughter can do great work in preparing for a pitch. Alice Isen, a psychologist whose research on positive emotion and creativity remains one of the most cited in the field, found something close to absurd when you first hear it. People who'd just watched a few minutes of a comedy film solved a classic creativity test correctly three times as often as people who hadn't.

A small, safe jolt of amusement loosens the part of the brain that finds the unlikely answer. A half-formed pitch and a half-formed premise die the same way, too safe to surprise anyone, or too unstructured to actually make appropriate sense. The same is true of writing either: calibration is a key part of the process.

Locating the sweet spot between too much, and too little, for a joke or a presentation is the same skill, practised the same way, which is most of what I mean by Developing Stronger Ideas.

Jennifer Aaker, a marketing professor at Stanford, notes the physical side of this. Laughing together with someone floods the brain with the same hormones tied to love and connection.

It matters in practical terms. A room that's laughed together trusts you sooner, forgives you faster and remembers you longer than an audience that's simply been dryly addressed.

Highlighting predictable scenarios as opportunities to inject a little playfulness and raise a smile is part of the mission.

Body language is a potent art/science, and is wonderful for reading and leading an audience of one, or many. Arguably the most powerful and universal element of non-verbal communication is quite simply to smile.

Any joke, or mere comment, told with a warm, open smile reads as coming from a good place. The same line delivered flat can read as snide or backhanded, and the room has to guess which one you meant. 

There are the own-goal fake smiles. And then there are the sincere ones (that could still be faked, there's technique) that do so much heavy-lifting when it comes to connection and delivery. It's wise to know the difference and how to tap into the latter.

Sarcasm, in particular, is typically a self-defeating weak effort. It takes no wit to produce, and it's wide open to being misread, especially in writing, where nobody can see the mitigating grin or chucklesome tone.

None of the workshops are about chasing the eights, nines and tens of hilarity that a stand-up is hunting for under a spotlight. In a normal workplace they would almost certainly be counter-productive anyhow.

In business the target is the twos, threes and fours, the small, warm, low-stakes attempt that gets a genuine smile rather than a laugh. Plus, there are pleasingly universal opportunities to apply straight-forward techniques for enhanced chuckling.

Team behaviour researchers, Lehmann-Willenbrock and Allen, spent two years video-recording fifty-four real teams in actual meetings, tracking not single jokes but the recurring rhythm of joking and laughing that showed up meeting after meeting. That pattern, not any one gag, predicted higher team performance both at the time and still ongoing, two years later.

A separate review by Caroline Rosenberg and colleagues at Deakin University put the same finding more plainly. Humour, used well, relieves tension, builds trust, lifts morale, and helps a leader form genuinely better relationships.

It's also, in Rosenberg's own words, a double-edged sword, which is worth bearing in mind.

Poorly judged humour signals the opposite of everything above.

Well judged, it's most of what separates a team that merely functions from one that actually wants to be in the room together, operating at a higher and happier level. Increased morale and resilience are baked in.

The boss who offered me a job that night wasn't wrong about the qualities that he'd seen. He was just imagining aiming them at the wrong outcome. What he'd watched wasn't a trading floor skill, at least, not only.

Nobody bombs quite like a comedian. It happens in front of a room, in real time, with nowhere to hide, and you're straight back up the following night doing it again.

That's the exact muscle a sales team needs when a call goes badly and the next one starts imminently. The workshop Bomb Proof: Sales Resilience Under Pressure takes that experience and prepares you for managing what can happen before, during and after a knock-back is likely.

Taina Vuorela, a researcher who studies humour in business negotiation, found it easing tension in real client meetings and giving people a graceful way out when a moment went wrong.

Christine Gockel, who studies negotiation, names the same effect plainly: the advantage of using humour that keeps you tough on the issue and soft on the people across the table.

I was flattered by the interest from the boss-man, yet I turned him down because I was having a great time in stand-up and wasn't looking for a job in finance.

More to the issue, I was already building this, the We Are Funny Project. If you want to see what lessons, learned up close and made memorable at thousands of stand-up gigs like that one, can actually turn into for a business team, have a look at what we do. 

Is this training the same as improv or comedy workshops?
No. These are business workshops built from stand-up and MC work specifically, finding and developing an idea, rehearsing and pitching it, reading a room, leading a room, body language, and building confidence before and during a high-stakes moment, taught as business skills rather than performance games.