How to Communicate Like Chris Rock - my column in yesterdays Minneapolis Star Tribune

Last weekend, Chris Rock performed a standup show live on Netflix. Rock, who is on the Mount Rushmore of standup comedians, was brilliant and funny as ever.

One thing that stood out was his clarity of communication. If you are a fan of his, you have probably noticed that when he is expressing a new concept, he repeats the theme over and over while he is elaborating on it.

This method will be familiar to frequent presenters, who are often coached to “tell them what you’re going to say, say it, and then tell them what you said.” His style is derived from his preacher grandfather, whose cadence and communication style he began to imitate early in his standup career.

Like many great standups, Rock’s comedy is spontaneous, but also deeply thought through (Steve Martin’s classic autobiography, Born Standing Up, describes how he spent a dozen years learning magic tricks, studying philosophy and practicing on stage before his brilliant goofy comedy took the country by storm in the mid 70’s).

Rock’s style is similarly calculated. In the 2011 HBO special Talking Funny, old friends Chris Rock, Louis CK, Ricky Gervais and Jerry Seinfeld spent an hour deconstructing how they approach their comedy. One of them points out Rock’s “twitch” of repeating the theme of a “bit” over and over. Rock explains that it is deliberate: “If I set up the premise up right, [a good joke] will always work”.

How can folks in the business world apply Chris Rock’s technique? Here are several do’s and don’ts:

1. Beware your audience and context: Rock tackles difficult topics with brilliance and humor. He’s also terribly crude. As he warns at one point in his special, “don’t tell these jokes at work!”

2. Not only don’t you have Chris Rock’s content, you don’t have his toolkit either. It’s unlikely you can successfully mimic his style.

3. In a corporate or social context, Rock’s style, well executed, can be a powerful tool to communicate new ideas. Taken to an extreme, it’s manipulative, the stuff of demagogues.

Still, there is a powerful lesson here, whether or not you agree with Rock’s views, or find him funny. As a best practice in communicating ideas, as in so many areas of life, it is powerful to “slow down to go faster”. Less is more in communicating: the spaces between the notes are important as the music itself.