Hannah Gadsby’s 60-minute magic trick: what comedians can teach us about creating lasting change

It begins just as we would expect. Peppy music fills the speakers to warm up an audience. A dark stage signals what’s to come. House lights shine on the audience cueing them to talk and settle in. She may rely on these usual gathering routines, but how comedian and Peabody award winner Hannah Gadsby describes her work sure breaks from it. “I have one job and that’s to connect”, she says. Her aim is to do more than make her audience laugh. She wants her work to live on and become bigger than one person. “It may begin in the person on stage...but it lives on and grows in other’s minds”. Gadsby knows, when all is said and done, the content she shares won’t matter. All that’s left is the connection she’s made. One room at a time. 

Connect, she has. In addition to numerous awards, Gadsby is now able to connect with millions of people around the world from her live performances to her two Netflix comedy specials. Her skill of connection is shared by many leaders and educators and one we can learn a lot from when our aim is to connect a message with the moment. She’s able to gather a group of people in a room (or around a television screen) and create a 60-minute experience that helps others think, be, or do differently. Here’s how Gadsby’s choices created a pull and personalized Gathering and how to apply these lessons to our own gatherings in the corporate world. 

Provide certainty through language

Those who enter our gatherings (especially if the gathering is announcing a large change) are likely anxious about what will happen. Anxiety is no friend to lasting change. One of the ways to shift the brain out of fight or flight mode is to provide certainty. But, how often do we enter a gathering not knowing what it will be about or what to expect? At Gadsby’s most recent show, attendees entered the theater to see a picture of a dog on a screen and the name, “Douglas” underneath it. This small choice helps the audience immediately understand how the name of the show (Douglas) connected to the content that would follow. Uncertainty decreased, focus increased.  

What to try: Name your gathering something clear and concrete. Try something different than “Tuesday Town Hall”. Avoid jargon. This relaxes the brain into being ready to digest information because it knows how to orient what’s about to come. Don’t waste attendees’ precious cognitive resources on asking them to map the course on their own.

Tell us how to feel about something 

Just like naming something gives us certainty, it can also provide a common language and shorthand. This shorthand serves us well in organizational life – it can cut down on misunderstanding, help us get on the same page faster, or in some cases, take the emotion or charge out of a potentially challenging situation.

Take the word ‘puckerfish’. In Gadsby’s same show, she offered this phrase to highlight her disdain for something. Over the course of her hour, she repeated this phrase each time that same emotion aroused. After the second use of that phrase, she no longer needed to explain what she meant. We understood it immediately. By the end of the show, she didn’t use the phrase at all. She simply moved her mouth as a puckerfish would. She taught us how she felt about something so that we as an audience knew how to feel too. We could share in her emotion.

What to do: Don’t shy away from emotion. We need it for change to last anyway. Introduce analogies or metaphors instead of just blocks of content. Knowing how you feel about something makes the content more real. This common language also helps gatherings scale. One message, multiple messengers. We can teach people more than content – we can teach people how to feel about something. Furthermore, it bonds a group of people together with more than a common language. It gives the group a common emotion.

Give your audience skin in the game

“Listen, the show is a bit too long, you see. I need to cut some. You’ll tell me what that should be”. In one line and in no more than 30 seconds of time, Gadsby pulled off the ultimate magic trick. Only, it was real.

One sentence of framing created the 5 conditions for a pull and personalized gathering 1) an important role to play 2) shifted them from passive consumers to active co-creators 3) a sense of ownership 4) raised their status and told them how important they are 5) signaled the gathering was unique and made for them. 

What to do: Gadsby knows - it’s the audience that decides what’s good. It’s our participants who help us carry out the changes we seek. Though we may “ask” for feedback when we gather, rarely is it said with such explicit language and safety. Tell people what you’ll do with their ideas and feedback and give them a reason and a role worthy of their status. 

Make your thinking visible

Agendas may be normal in corporate gatherings, but not in comedy shows. Except Gadsby’s. The first 10 minutes of Douglas begins by setting expectations. Gadsby lays it all out there - she tells the audience the flow of her show, how long each segment will be, what to expect, how they might react, and more. 

Though this may seem unconventional Gadsby knows this serves a distinct purpose: it tells the audience they are in good hands. We can trust her. 

With the agenda out of the way, an audience can just listen and relax without wondering where it’s going. She also heightens our curiosity and anticipation because we know what to expect and can track it. It’s like knowing where the dips are on a rollercoaster before you strap in. 

She starts with the common comedy troupe: a monologue. It’s about something familiar and universal. Light and not too offensive. It’s what an audience expects and so it’s a natural place to begin. It meets people where they are. Slowly, she raises the stakes, one part after the other. And because she’s built up our trust it’s more likely the audience will follow her. 

What to do: Agendas are one thing. Telling us how each part connects and how it helps us get from A to B is another. “By the end of our time together…”. Instead of listing the steps in a recipe, tell your audience how each part contributes to the final product. Furthermore, give them a role and something to watch for. It’s ok to give people a peek behind your process - they’ll be wondering where you’re headed so you might as well tell them. 

Though a magician may practice their tricks alone, they need an audience to survive and thrive. So do our change efforts.

Our content is only as helpful and beneficial as our audience’s connection to it. Our job is not simply to share content – it is to help close the gap between the utility of the information and the participant’s ability to do something with it. In each of these tips, the content is not the main attraction. The solution then is not to give more, but to give what exists more meaning, more personal attachment, and a roadmap for its utility.

As I walked out of the theater after Gadsby’s show, I heard dozens of patrons starting to spar, debate, and discuss what they just saw. The gathering made them think and left space for people to connect the dots themselves. This is equivalent to people staying late on a Zoom call or gatherings that extend into the hallway to continue the conversation. Simply put, this is engagement. And it’s what many of us strive for.

The value of these gatherings rarely comes from checking all the boxes, telling all the jokes, or clicking all the slides in 60 minutes. The true value is in handing off ownership of the experience to someone else. This is how change sticks and spreads. No puckerfish here.