How Business Can Learn From Robin Williams’ Comedy: MBA News

Robin Williams’ wife is right to urge members of the public to focus on the comedian and actor’s life, rather than his untimely death. For, there have been few who have brought so much laughter to so many – and over such a lengthy period of time, transcending generational divides with consummate ease.

The life and work of Robin Williams should therefore serve as a reminder of the importance of laughter, something that can seem in short supply in the corporate world, yet is known to reduce levels of stress, boost engagement and drive creativity – all valuable business benefits.

That laughter can be a powerful tool in boosting happiness and productivity among an organization’s employees is a point taken up in a talk given by a member of this year’s graduating class at Stanford GSB. However, Eric Tsytsylin says today’s professional adults are in a ‘laughter drought’ – adults over the age of 35 laugh an average of 15 times a day, more than 25 times fewer than most babies’ count of 400.    

How can one combat this at an organizational level? Robin Williams as Mork might simply jump around shouting, “nanu nanu.”  But in reality, office-appropriate humor is a tricky beast to fathom.

Research has been conducted in search of laughter’s great unifier, as one recent Harvard Business Review article discusses. An example cited is The Humor Code, co-authored by a marketing and psychology professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, which concludes that comedy may be context-dependent but centers on making light of something that its audience finds a little unsettling or threatening.

Standup comedy at business school and use in the corporate world

At business school, the gift of laughter can help students take the edge off an MBA program’s intensity and pressures that could, at times, be seen as threatening.

Wharton, for example, has an established comedy club that offers members the chance to push their comfort zones in a low-risk environment by trying out a little standup comedy and a long-running sketch comedy show has been a recurring outlet for MBA students at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business to put life at the school in humorous perspective.

Poking fun at business school life, and the corporate world as a whole, became a cult hit for two MIT Sloan students behind 2011’s The MBA Show and turned into a standup comedy career for one Yale MBA alumnus. Anish Shah took his ‘B-School Made Me Funny’ tour across the US in 2012 having previously worked with McKinsey and IBM. In an interview with Businessweek, Shah explained the overlap from his previous work: “In comedy you deal with drunken hecklers, and in the corporate world you deal with people who don’t like your PowerPoint. Both audiences are looking at you skeptically.”

Winning over an audience, a skill that Robin Williams excelled at, is something that resonates both with standup comedy and the corporate world, and schools have been known to turn to comedy as a means of working on communication skills, particularly a person’s ability to be both articulate and persuasive.

Looking at techniques behind engaging communication was a chief motivating factor behind the UK’s Warwick Business School hosting a workshop led by a comedian earlier this year, and one faculty member at The Vanderbilt Owen Graduate School of Management used to require his MBAs to write a five-minute standup comedy routine because it was “the most challenging presentation of any form. Your timing, your nuances, your delivery have to be exact. All leaders have to be great storytellers,” according to the communications professor, Fred Talbott.