Teaching public speaking, my students are filled with fear. They’re afraid they’ll faint, forget their speech, sweat profusely, look like an idiot or say “um” uncontrollably. My experiences doing standup comedy have taught me that our perception of failing is based on a false assumption: that failure destroys an audience’s perception of us. I’m defining failure loosely to apply to anything that goes wrong while speaking. In truth, I've found that a certain amount of failure—if one has the right attitude—actually endears the speaker to the audience.
Let me share some experiences I’ve had on stage. One was during a comedy competition. It was a three-night competition. The second night I bombed badly. I had a joke about a mouse caught in a trap and described the poor fellow as felt covered in maggots. Apparently “maggots” is the trigger word that mystically causes all funniness to evaporate.
I continued with my juvenile parody of the Mickey Mouse song. The audience just stared in disgust. Looking back, I can understand why. The material I had wasn’t funny. I hadn’t been doing comedy long and I was trying so desperately to be funny that I was grasping at anything.
Is that awkward moment I created the death of comedy? I’ve seen more skilled comedians tell worse jokes than that and recover from it. My failure wasn’t what killed my performance. My attitude killed my performance. I heard that little self-critical voice in my head say, “You’ll never get this audience back!” And, that night I didn’t.
The next night of the performance the pressure was off. I wasn’t going to win, so I took the stage and just had fun. I talked about my failures the night before. I even roasted the judges. Of all the competitors, that was one of the strongest performances. A different night and a different mindset made all the difference.
I remember another performance at a small comedy club. No one that evening was getting laughs. The audience just stared blankly. At this point, I was a little more experienced doing comedy. I had accepted the fact that I was going to have some failures on stage, but I had changed my mindset on failure. I saw failure as an opportunity. Failure is real and relatable. People understand failure. When a joke bombs, it’s the most human moment a comedian can have on stage. So, why view bombing a joke as a failure? When a joke bombs, just find the funny in the experience. That night most of my jokes bombed, but I just reacted to the awkward silence with a positive attitude and made light of the situation. Those attitudes and reactions were receiving big laughs—bigger laughs than others who took the stage.
What is true of comedy is true of all public speaking. Your mindset is often the determining factor. If you allow the fear of failure to poison your mindset, when something unexpected happens on stage (the mic doesn’t work, your joke bombs, you drop your note cards or whatever) your inner, self-critical voice is going to tell you, “You’ll never get this audience back.” Those unexpected circumstances that we view as failing are often ripe with the opportunity of endearing us to the audience. All it takes is a change in mindset.
