Start With A Win - What Comedy Teaches Us About Business with Dr. Peter McGraw

Episode Date: April 14, 2021

Our guest on this episode of Start With a Win is Dr. Peter McGraw. He is a behavioral economist, professor, author, podcaster, and comedy student. He has recently written a new book entitled Shtick to Business which discusses how humor integrates with business, including the many lessons that leaders can learn from comedians. One of the main aspects of Peter’s research has been the theory of humor. Using an A/B test, he asked participants what they thought of certain things – did they find them funny? Boring? Offensive? Do their feelings towards those things change over time or based on their circumstances? Ultimately, he concluded that the funny things contain benign violations—or things that are wrong and ok at the same time. For both comedians and business leaders, experimentation is key to determining what benign violations will translate well to an audience. Another aspect of humor that business leaders can utilize in the workplace is thinking in reverse to challenge the status quo. Peter has adapted this idea, developing an alternative form of brainstorming, which he calls “shtick-storming.” The concept focuses on encouraging everyone to come up with the most terrible ideas. This exercise allows leaders to actually take the pressure off of the brainstorming process, creating a freer flow of ideas which might make way for something so crazy that it actually might work.Peter also encourages leaders to be good listeners and to champion collaboration, which will lead to innovation. Additionally, he says, leaders have to reckon with the fact they can’t make everyone happy and that sometimes they have to choose the problem they want to live with. For more insights that Peter has learned through studying the science of humor and behavioral economics, be sure to check out his book.Connect with Peter:https://petermcgraw.org/https://www.amazon.com/Shtick-Business-Breaking-Fearless-Building-ebook/dp/B085RSR2K8 https://twitter.com/PeterMcGrawhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/petermcgraw Connect with Adam:https://www.startwithawin.com/ https://www.facebook.com/REMAXAdamContoshttps://twitter.com/REMAXAdamContos https://www.instagram.com/REMAXadamcontos/ Leave us a voicemail:888-581-4430

Every day is filled with choices. You're here because you're choosing to start with a win. Get ready to be inspired, learn something new, and connect with the win nation. Coming to you from Denver, Colorado, Adam Conta, CEO of Remax with Start With The Wind. Looking across my screen here to producer Mark. How you doing, buddy? I'm doing fantabulous this afternoon, morning, or evening. Whatever it is when we're listening. That's right. Awesome. Hey, we've got a really fun guest today. Peter McGraw, Dr. Peter McGraw.

We'll call him Peter Doc, something like that, who actually partook in our dance moves on the way in. Peter, welcome to the show, my friend. Oh, it's great to be here, Adam and producer Mark. I can't help but do a little chair dancing. It's my best type of dancing. It's kind of hard when there's this microphone in front of you, but hey, you know, works out well. So, hey, Dr. Peter McGraw. Peter is a behavioral economist, professor, speaker,

author, and humor researcher. So make sure you stick around for the entire show. This should be fun. Dr. McGraw directs the humor research lab at the University of Colorado Boulder, is the author of Stick to Business and the Humor Code, and host of the podcast I'm Not Joking and Solo. So his work and humor has been covered by HBR, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Time, NPR, BBC, and CNN. Those people are all boring people. How did they have you on there, man? You need a good PR person to get into those places. I guess so. So you talk about, I mean, you just don't talk about economics, but you talk about how humor weaves into business

and creates this ability to build cognitive flexibility, cultural awareness, tolerance for ambiguity, uncertainty risk, things like that. I mean, you've heard the term, if you can't laugh at yourself, you can't laugh, I guess. So this is fun. So welcome to the show. Yeah, it's great to be here. Hearing you say all those things may I go, wow, I guess my busyness is paying off. Yeah. Yeah, you're making it, man. That's awesome. When I heard you teach an MBA course, I'm like, hey, why didn't I hear about this MBA class when I signed up for mine? It's kind of a bunch of crap. I missed out on the

fun one. I had to sit there and listen to people talk in monotone voices and stuff like that. Yeah. I slow play it, but my students Google me and then they're suddenly raising their hand asking what makes things funny. That's awesome. So let's talk about the behavioral economics and the scientific study of humor. So I mean, why those things and how do they play together? Well, they typically don't. So the study of humor is an age-old question. It actually goes back to Plato and Aristotle. And to be honest, people way smarter than me have been trying to crack the humor code for 2,500 years. Folks like Thomas Hobbes, Immanuel Kant, Sigmund Freud. But the advantage I have over these, you know, largely philosophers and great minds comes

out of the world of behavioral economics. And that is I can run experiments. And that's my only edge. I stand on the shoulders of giants. And I just have a tool that didn't exist until rather recently. And I can run experiments. And as you know, as someone who works with people in entrepreneurial ventures, they know the value of an experiment. They know the value of an A-B test. And so I basically have A-B tested my way into explaining what makes things funny. All right. So give us an example of one of those A-B tests.

What do you call people up and say, tell me if this makes you laugh or does this make you engage with the business? I mean, what does an A-B test in that space look like? Well, so, you know, the basic elements of an A-B test is you have a control group and an experimental group, and they're randomly assigned. And the key is that random assignment is there. So you know that any difference between the two groups is due to either the A or the B, the control or the experiment. And so what we do in the humor research lab, and you missed an opportunity for a laugh line, Adam, and that is we call the humor research lab HURL as its acronym. Good one.

We have a theory of humor, which I'm sure we'll cover briefly, and we essentially pull these different levers, and we do. We measure whether they laugh, whether they tell us something is funny, whether they tell us it's boring, or unfortunately at times something's offensive. Because as important as comedy is in the world, it also can be dangerous, right? It can be challenging to do. It's hard to be funny, two ways to fail. And sometimes we fail in a way that gets us in a lot of trouble. Well, that's important. Let's, let's kind of hone in on that last piece for a second here before we

get into the, into the theory, because we've seen a lot more of that, you know, lately, I don't know if it's everybody being locked up from COVID or politics or what, but you get this, somebody says something and it becomes offensive where other people go, no, that was just kind of funny. They were trying to be lighthearted. I mean, why are we changing when it comes to that? Or are we not changing? We're just becoming more sensitive or, I mean, you know, has that affected your studies at all? Or are you still seeing the same thing and everybody's just like paying attention to it now? What's your perspective on that? Yeah. So, you know, it looks like a new phenomenon, but it actually goes back

till the beginnings of comedy. Um, so people were getting in trouble. Obviously Lenny Bruce is the most well-known person. Um, but people haven't always been happy with Richard Pryor and, and George Carlin and so on. The difference nowadays is the amplification, you know, the fact that social media now allows someone to hear a joke that wasn't meant for them, and it allows them to complain loudly about a joke and band together. And it, I think, in some ways, you know, reflects kind of, to be honest, some good sensitivities in the world, right? You know, we want to keep people safe. We want our workplaces to be diverse and inclusive. And so jokes that don't land, even well-meaning jokes that don't land, can cause harm. And so my most recent iteration of my work in the book that you mentioned earlier, Stick to Business, is really a book that says, hey, comedy is great. We love it. It can be used as a powerful tool. As you talked about earlier, being self-deprecating can be a great way to have a leader to be more approachable and so on.

But I have a hunch that we got to be worried about that guy, the guy in the workplace who's not very skilled. And if we tell him to be funnier, look out. And so I have an alternative formula that everybody can use to benefit both their own professional and personal lives. Okay. Well, let's get into that formula then, because this is really important. One of the first things they teach you when you're learning public speaking, you're getting on stage, you're giving a lot of presentations, either in front of Wall Street analysts or employees or customers or whatever is don't tell a joke unless you're a comedian. Because it just, I mean, it never goes over well. And people

are like, you know, it falls flat every single time. I've stepped on it many times trying that, going, you know, you trip and fall off the stage pretty much. So throw this theory at us in your formula because I'm really interested in it. I don't want to have bad jokes anymore on stage. Right. Okay. So there's two elements. Let's talk about what makes things funny. Let's answer the question that Aristotle and Plato puzzled over. And the quick answer to this is that we laugh at, we're amused by things that are wrong yet okay. Things that don't make sense yet make sense. Things that are threatening yet safe.

And we call them benign violations. And it's a fancy term for basically you create a situation that's wrong yet okay. And that explains, for example, the two ways a joke can fail, right? So when you trip over yourself on stage, I hope you're falling on the boring side of the joke, the benign side, and not on the violation side, the wrong side. Because you're just looking for that little, you can imagine this sort of as a Venn diagram, the overlap of wrong and okay. That's hard. That's a hard sliver to hit. The world's funniest people have good instincts. You know, I chatted with you before this. You're a funny guy. You've got good instincts. But what the world's funniest people do is they experiment, right? They're never telling a joke

for the first time in front of a theater while taping a special. They're doing it in dingy basements and open mic nights where it's safe to fail. And so oftentimes the things that are funniest have already been vetted, have been tried out with audience after audience after audience. And you don't have that luxury within a workplace. You often don't have that luxury with a keynote. I keep my, I focus on storytelling. I use a lot of people's jokes that I know work, right? I get to use George Carlin's jokes as examples and I get my audience laughing and it's pretty safe. And if they're not laughing, they're pissed at George and not at me. That's perfect. So, you know, you've talked about how the pros go out and test this. Is there a way that

people can develop their own shtick, whatever it is, and, and, you know, get something going where they do become more approachable, more, um, more connecting with their audience, uh, you know, without having to go handle open mic night or is, you know, how can we as normal working people get this down? Yes. No, no. So here's my formula. It's not a matter of being funny. It's a matter of thinking funny. That is what we can do is we can learn from the practices and perspectives of the world's funniest people to be more innovative, to be more approachable, to be better leaders, to better manage our careers. So the masters of comedy, they seem like clowns. You know what I mean? They seem like silly people oftentimes. They're not to be taken

seriously, but they are artists and they are experimenters and they are business people and they're able to climb and become one of the best in the world as something that is incredibly difficult to do because they have these tips, these tricks, these practices that can be learned and then can, in my opinion, can be applied to a broader array of creative endeavors. I can give you an example of this if it'll help. Yes, absolutely. Right now it feels very abstract, doesn't it? Yeah. Yeah, dig deeper. Okay. So the first chapter of my book is called, the title of the chapter is Reverse It. And the

lesson is about producing an opposing perspective. So the world's funniest people either naturally intuit this, or they figure it out on like day one. And it goes something like this. Henny Youngman, the king of the one-liners, has a joke, a one-liner, obviously. And it says, when I read about the dangers of drinking, I stopped. Adam, what do you think he stopped doing when he read about the dangers of drinking? Reading. That's exactly right.

Because Henny likes a good cocktail, right? You know what I mean? He's not going to give up drinking. He's going to give up reading. So he reverses it in a sense, and it creates a very funny moment. So a reversal can be a good way to be funny as a punchline to a joke. It can also be a very funny premise to a movie or sketch or something like that. So the movie Trading Places takes Dan Aykroyd, the high-status person, and moves him down into the low-status.

It takes Eddie Murphy, the low-status street hustler, and turns himself into a banker. Trainwreck is a reverse rom-com where the girl loses the boy and the girl gets the boy back. And so it's a very useful comedic technique. Thinking in reverse is incredibly useful for us in our own professional and personal lives. I'll give you a quick example of this from the world of entrepreneurship. Imagine you're two Brooklyn-based entrepreneurs. You're getting into the mobile phone market. How do you outsmart Apple and Samsung in the smartphone market?

Years ahead of you, tons of bright engineers. What they do is they head in the opposite direction. They don't create a smartphone. They create a dumb phone. A phone for people who don't want to be more connected, but rather people who want to be less connected. And so what often happens when we reverse our thinking, we're often in a space where no one else is. We're going against the status quo. We are often, as I like to say, swimming blue ocean. Oh, okay. So what's the insurance company with with flow progressive. Yeah. They, their commercials are all about that reversal. When you think about it, you know, the our neighbor has bad pipes or something like

that. And there's a bag Piper. Oh yes, they do. They do. They, they have a nice comedic element to their, they do. I'll give you an example of this that your listeners can use immediately with their teams. And I don't know the rating of your podcast, but I call it shitstorming. Okay. So the HR-friendly term is schtickstorming. So if you need to sell it to your, you know, if you work at GE, you need to sell it to your boss. There we go. So think about it.

Brainstorming is an outdated technique, right? It was, it was invented in the fifties and sixties and it never has been that good. Its intentions are good, but it doesn't work out because to brainstorm solutions to a problem doesn't really create very creative solutions because people hold back what they're, they're going to say, cause they don't want to be judged. Well, when I work with execs, and we do shitstorming, the goal of shitstorming is to brainstorm truly terrible ideas. And this has three benefits. The first one is, it's a great warm-up for any sort of subsequent creative endeavor, because it's lots and lots of fun. People have lots of laughs, they lean into it. It takes down their kind of natural sort of defenses that are there. And then every so often, someone goes, you know, that idea is so crazy. It just might work.

And when you think about it, it's oftentimes the stupidest, craziest ideas that end up becoming the most groundbreaking. I'll tell you, Peter, that end up becoming the most groundbreaking. I'll tell you, Peter, that's brilliant. Having sat through so many brainstorming meetings, you sit there and you go, we walked out of here after hours and came up with the dumbest, most simple thing, and it was perfect. I mean, that's a great idea. So thank you. I hope everybody's writing this one down. So I want to jump from that into innovation via collaboration and how you talk about stand-up and things of that nature, improv, sketch comedy, stuff like that. So can you jump into that a little bit and tell us how that helps develop that creative genius? Yeah, I think that we have, I think we have these false narratives in the world of business. We have this, we have this narrative of the lone genius, you know,

Edison and Steve Jobs and so on. And anybody who knows anything about these, these great innovators lives knows that they have teams and teams of people filled with creativity, hard work, collaboration, and so on. And so really what ends up happening is, yes, a lone genius may have a great idea, may have a creative idea, right? Bill Burr jokes that Steve Jobs gets to get credit for like, all right, I want you to take a phone, a CD player, and a computer and put it in this, stick it into this thing, right? And that is an amazing idea, world-changing idea, but you need people to stick it into that piece of technology. And as a result, what you have to do is to be able to collaborate, to use your term.

And I think that it doesn't seem to be obvious at first, but comics are master collaborators, especially improvisers, right? Improvisers are creating a scene out of nothing and creating a scene that is funny out of nothing. How do they do that? Well, we all know about Yes And. Sure, that works. That helps. But one of the things comes from Del Close, who's the father of improv. He says, we are all supporting actors. He wants everyone on the stage to be trying to make everyone else on the stage the star of the show. And one way that you do that is to be a great listener. And to be a great listener goes against our instincts as leaders, right? What we want to do oftentimes is go in like,

all right, this is how I think we should solve this problem. What do you think? And you're not going to, as the CEO of the company, the founder of the company, whatever your role is, going to get people to push back on you. What you want to say is, we have this problem. What do you think I should do? And then just shut up and let your team do what they're meant to do. Do what you hired them to do, which is to solve important

problems. And even a stand-up comic, the lone wolf, seemingly on their own, the lone genius, and yet that person collaborates all the time. They work with other comics who at the bar after the show help them punch up their jokes. And they listen to their audience. So George Burns used to puff on his stogie and pay attention to what people were laughing at and use that time to process and think. He was a master listener, even though he was the star of the show. And so we can learn from what goes into making this tough thing a joke into making something else that's tough, some innovation. That is such a great business idea. We've got, we have so many people that they wait for somebody

to pause just for this blank of speaking so that they can dive in and throw their idea out there instead of reading what's going on, allowing that pause to happen. And I'll tell you, I'm sitting here listening to you going, all right, last time I was in a comedy club, I watched this happen. Yes, absolutely. And it's this amazing study in human nature and behavior psychology and things of that nature where you sit there and you watch the comic says something and then they just watch. They look around and they watch for somebody to say something, somebody to do something. But it's kind of fun.

And being on stage, you look around and you kind of watch for the feedback and then you dig deeper because you know you're making impact. And that's really what you want to do in a sales presentation, in a business meeting, things of that nature, because that's where you find the gold. It's amazing how that's when the brilliance starts coming out. Speaking of being a comic in a comedy club, I have a special contributor to Stick to Business. His name is Shane Moss. He's a road warrior. He's out there crisscrossing the United States as a headliner at comedy clubs everywhere. He feels like his best sets, and this is one of the lessons in the book, the lessons called create a chasm.

He's had a great set if one table gets up and walks out. And so the audience is laughing, but that one table shaking their heads gets up and walks out. I think that that's actually a good lesson for your listeners. In business, we have this tendency. We want to please everyone. We want to say yes to everything. And yet the best businesses, especially when they're starting out, they create a chasm. That is, they find a target market and they make that target market not just happy, but delighted.

The problem, of course, is that when you make one group of people really, really happy, you're likely to make another group of people really, really unhappy. And so in a world of people, some who want hot tea and some who want iced tea, if you serve them all warm tea, you make no one happy. And so comics are all about choosing one or the other and then leaning into that. And I think that's a good reminder for folks who are making something. You can't make everyone happy. If you try to make everyone happy, you're probably going to fail. That's very, very important. Another one of those nuggets of gold for our audience there. Yeah. You know, it's choose your best customers. You should's choose your best customers.

You should always choose your best customers because those are the customers that you will always have in, in sales and business, things like that. And you, you know, you also don't want, you don't want employees who are very vanilla on everything that don't give you a feedback that just show up just to, you know, just to punch the clock, things like that. I mean, you, you, you need feedback. You need, you need to tussle with, with ideas and, and, um, and do it lovingly with your, uh, with your staff. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. And so we've, I mean, heck, we've already burned through 20 minutes in this talking about, this is really interesting because I love the aspects of the psychology, how it plays into business, but it's all human nature. You look at, you talked about the Greek philosophers and Aristotle and Plato. I love studying Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates

and how they came together. They all kind of taught each other in that order down there. And I'm Greek, so I kind of lean on that. I don't think I got anything from them, but it's fun to read their workings. But it's brilliant when you actually take a step back and stop pitching your sales pitch and actually look at how people are reacting to it. And, and that means a ton. It means a whole lot. The best salespeople listen, they listen first and sell second. Yeah. And totally that's right. Totally. So Peter, I think a lot of people are going to want to read this book here. Where can we find it? Where can we find you on social media? Sure. The book is on Amazon, like every other book. And you can find me on LinkedIn for Peter McGraw. I'm happy to connect.

I'm on Twitter at Peter McGraw, and you can get everything at my website, petermcgraw.org. Awesome. I love it. And thank you for educating our future business leaders at University of Colorado. You know, go Buffaloes. My son goes to your rival school, CSU. But, you know, it's okay. It's okay. Right up the road there from you. But anyhow, we appreciate you being on Start With A Win.

And I ask every one of our guests a question. And we get some really good answers. I'm sure yours is going to be a lot of fun here. But Peter, how do you start your day with a win? I believe that the start of the day is the most important part of the day. So I start very, first of all, I'm like shot out of a cannon in the morning. It's a great gift, except in my dating life, when someone wants to stay and cuddle. But I'm like shot out of a cannon.

I drink a big glass of water. I brush my teeth. I wash my face. And as quickly as possible, I am either trying to set up at my workspace or at a cafe, and I start my day, it's part of my ritual, with a delicious cappuccino. And I do this because it brings me pleasure. You get a little bit of hit from the caffeine, not too much. And it says to me,

Pete, it's time to begin your creative work. And that's how I start my day. Excellent. I love that ritual. I mean, that's very close to kind of how I start my day as well. So Dr. Peter McGraw, behavioral economist, professor, speaker, author, humor researcher. Thank you so much for being with us here today on Start With A Win. Oh, it's my pleasure, Adam. Thanks so much. And thank you so much for listening to Start With A Win. If you'd like to ask Adam a question or tell us your Start With A Win story, give us a call, leave us a message at 888-581-4430.

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