Hello, everyone. My name is Joanne Lockwood and I'm your host for the Inclusion Bites podcast. In this series, I have interviewed a number of amazing people and simply had a conversation around the subject of inclusion, belonging and generally making the world a better place for everyone to thrive. If you'd like to join me in the future, then please do drop me a line to jo.Lockwood@seechangehappen.co.uk. That's S-E-E Change Happen dot Co dot Uk. You can catch up with all of the previous shows on iTunes, Spotify and the usual places. So plug in your headphones, grab a decaf and let's get going.

Today is episode 99 with the title laughter as a lens, and I have the absolute honour and privilege to welcome Beth Sherman. Now, Beth is a multi Emmy award winning comedy writer and speaker on the power of humour for human connection. When I asked Beth to describe her superpower, she said, she can make you funny even if you don't think you are. Hello, Beth. Welcome to the show.

Hi, Jo. Thanks for having me.

I should actually say, welcome back to the show. You have the honour of being my first repeat guest because we had such terrible Internet troubles last time that we had to basically write the entire soundtrack off. It just wasn't usable, was it?

No. And it was all the fault of my Internet. We disconnected from Zoom. My spotty Internet disconnected from Zoom seven times. I had just moved and the Internet was not properly set up. So BT had given me sort of an interim device that did not work as so. But you know what, in show business, they say, bad dress rehearsal, great show, great show. It was a terrible dress rehearsal.

But in the spirit of this conversation, laugh was a lens. We did have quite a laugh, despite the problems. And it was like a real outtakes blooper reel, wasn't it?

At times, it really is, but that's what humour does. It is quick connection and being able to laugh at yourself, being able to laugh at the situation. Yeah, I guess we both could have just gotten angrier and angrier. I mean, there was part of it, but at a certain point you just have to look at each other and roll your eyes and laugh. I mean, it was absurd. The first time it was uncomfortable. The second time, it was awkward. The third time it's just silly.

But that is connection. I mean, are you going to forget that taping? I know I'm not. I'll try.

Maybe we will publish a bloopers reel at some point, but it was a cross between going through a tunnel on a mobile phone and an episode of Doctor who with the Daleks trying to exterminate somebody. It was a really broken up conversation. Every so often you'd freeze. And I was thinking, are you going to come back or aren't you going to come back? And it's comedy genius.

Well, and it became a talking point for us. It became a way to. Well, it's become a reference for us. I mean, I'm sure when we run into each other again, it will come up. It becomes a shared experience, so why not turn a negative into a positive?

Yeah. So you're an Emmy award winning writer. Tell us a bit about your background and how you got here today to.

The second bedroom where we're recording this. Where I'm recording this. We're not in a bedroom together. Well, I am a comedy writer by trade. I fell in love with the idea of writing comedy for television from the time I realised it was a job. And I can actually remember that because I was about 15, I watched a behind the scenes news programme on a sitcom that I loved, and they weren't focusing on the cast behind the scenes. They showed us a magical place called the writers room. And it was just ten guys sitting around a conference table being funny.

And they got paid for it and it was a job and it was guys, mostly guys at the time. But as soon as I realised that was a job, it's the only thing I ever wanted to do. And I'd been obsessed with stand up, so I just always had an ear for comedy. I went to university, I moved to Los Angeles. I'm born and raised in Philadelphia, nowhere near show business, nowhere anything like that. I moved to Los Angeles after college to go follow my dreams. I didn't know anyone except a woman that I'd gone to college with. And I started at the bottom, getting coffee, making copies.

I started as a production assistant, worked my way up to writer's assistant, and then eventually started getting paid writing jobs on tv shows. And I found my tribe. It was my place and I absolutely loved it. I did that for. Well, I'm still doing that. That's 27 years. And along the way, I didn't have the courage to do stand up myself, even though I was in love with it. I didn't really find the courage to do that until I'd had a few professional comedy writing jobs under my belt.

And I also found myself writing for a lot of comedians who pushed me to try stand up myself. So within that career, I also did 15 years of stand up and about six or seven years ago, because the nature of tv work is it's freelance. So sometimes the jobs last three years or five years and sometimes they're ten weeks and quite a bit of them were ten weeks. And to fill some of that period in between, I started writing for doing speech writing for non entertainment professionals. So helping people who were doing TED talks or delivering sea level executives, delivering speeches, helping them make their speeches funnier and more engaging. A lot of very smart people delivering Ted talks, helping them not sound like a robot, but finding a way to be authentically funny, because there's nothing worse than listening to someone shoehorn in a joke that clearly has nothing to do with them or their personality. So I also fell in love with that side of it. I just love bringing humour into the world and working one to one with a lot of these speech writing clients made me realise that a lot of the things I do instinctively and my friends and colleagues do instinctively does not come instinctively to other people.

I've been working as a professional comedy writer since I'm in that world since I was 20 years old. So I just assume everyone thinks that way, but they don't. And as I was explaining over and over again to one to one clients, or pointing out these comedic opportunities in the material they'd written, and again, not trying to make them into stand up comedians, just trying to make that quarterly report or the TED talk, just give it a little bit of humour, a little bit of balance to some serious subjects. I realised that I had something to teach and to share. And so I've now started speaking on the subject and talking about humour as a tool for quick connection.

There's a massive fear of public speaking, let alone professional speaking. It's even got its own term, glossophobia, fear of public speaking. And it's one of the biggest kind of anxieties that most human beings can face in their life, actually having to stand up on stage or stand up in public, or even stand in front of a room of your team and speak. It must be doubly difficult, if you have that anxiety about speaking anyway, to add some of yourself, some of your humour in there, because you're so focusing on the content or what you've got to try and say, or being professional or creating a great impression that you can't relax into it. So how do you help people overcome that fear of public speaking and therefore embrace their comedic self or humorous self?

Well, there's that great Seinfeld joke about the fear of public speaking, where that it's one of the biggest fears, which means that at a funeral, most people would rather be the person in the coffin rather than the one delivering the eulogy. But to me, what takes away some of that fear of public speaking, one, like the fear of doing anything, is preparation. So knowing that you have good material to deliver helps. And when I work one to one with people who. Well, and also, again, adding humour to something isn't just about trying to make someone a stand up comedian. So if someone is getting up to give a best man speech or a father of the bride speech, I work with a lot of clients doing those. A great way to add humour is just to be yourself and add authenticity. So if I've got someone who's terrified and they're giving a speech where it's going to be so distracting to them and to the audience, where their nerves will be a massive distraction, not just to them, but to the audience, people will really see them and see how nervous they are, you have to acknowledge it.

So give them a joke. I mean, give them something that sounds like. I have to be honest, I'm not comfortable speaking in public. It's not my favourite thing to do. So if I pass out from nerves, just drag me back to my seat when I come to tell me I was great. And it's the kind of thing, it's just acknowledge. It's a dialogue. When you're up on a stage in front of people, whatever it is that you're doing, it's a dialogue.

So let the other half of. Let the other party in the conversation know how you're feeling. And if you're nervous, you don't always have to acknowledge it. Sometimes it's just kind of that little adrenaline rush. But if it's the elephant in the room and it's something that's going to be a distraction to yourself so that you can't get the words out or to your audience, you don't want them sitting there thinking, oh, that poor guy. Oh, this is awkward. Oh, this is uncomfortable. If they know the stakes, if they know how you feel and they know the stakes, or if your opportunity to speak, if you acknowledge, I couldn't turn down this opportunity and they know you're nervous, they're going to root for you, they want you to succeed.

If they know what you're up against, if they know you have a paralysing fear of public speaking and you're up there and you're doing it anyway, let them know that, because now, well, one, you've made yourself a little bit vulnerable, but you've connected with them, and if you can do that, with a little bit of a sense of humour, more the better. But now you've got people that are on your side.

I remember delivering the speech at our daughter's wedding a couple of years ago and it was like I was given 15 minutes and it was the toughest audience I think I've ever had because I wasn't speaking around what a professional speaker myself. So I wasn't speaking about my day job, I wasn't thinking about my comfort zone, the things that I speak about all the time. I was trying to be entertaining for a guest list. I only knew probably a third of them. I was under strict instructions. My daughter's husband actually took me to one side and said, you must not make it. These embarrassing statements. You must not show my husband.

I was giving this kind of like, up talk to me and saying, give me a brief on how I had to behave. And I thought. And it was trying to put some humour in there because you can't make that stuff. It's got to be light hearted. So I told some anecdotes around. My daughter's life just sailed close to the wind where I knew the red line was I didn't cross it. I just took people there and I led them down the path without telling them the punchline. And you can guess what happened next.

And so she then had to explain it to all her friends what happened next. So I let her do the telling. But I remember telling this gag at the end and I won't tell it now, but I tell this gag at the end that even now, people who are at the wedding still remember that gag because it was so relevant. It was a play on their name and their surname and, yeah, they still remember it now. And everyone's going, wow, that's fantastic. And even the mother of the bridegroom, my daughter's mother in law, even finds it funny, even though it's her name. I was taking the mickey out of sort of thing. So you can build it in, provided you understand the boundaries of where humour stops and embarrassment starts or discrimination or bullying or whatever that may be.

That's the fine line in comedy, isn't it? It's knowing when to punch up, not punch down.

Well, of course. I mean, humour is a tool, and like any tool, you can use it to build something. You can use a hammer to build something, or you could use it for much worse purposes. Good for you for giving a speech, by the way, just as a public service announcement, if you're getting married, don't give anyone 15 minutes. It's a lot of time. I mean, you are a professional speaker, so they were in good hands. But 15 minutes is a long time. If you've got just the best man, that's an invitation you might live to regret.

5 minutes. 5 minutes is a general, good rule. Yeah, but the difference between knowing where the line is, I mean, in a personal speech, what I find works very well is if you have anything that you know because you love this person isn't crossing a line, but the person, you think the person might see it as a little bit embarrassing, but you feel in good conscience that it's not awful. You know, your daughter, sometimes you can get away with something like that by sort of sandwiching it within a bunch of. Within compliments. She's this and she's that. She's this wonderful. Has this wonderful quality.

That wonderful quality. But sometimes she blank. She does this. So you put it out there in a way where it's clearly affectionate, clearly balanced, and the admiration and the respect that you have for her is abundantly clear. Sometimes that's a way to navigate it. I have a lot of clients where it just sounds like a roast and it becomes un. Would you like to say something nice about this person who is your best friend? Even though we all know that they feel that way in professional speeches, I always recommend playing it safe. If you're not sure, don't say it.

There's a leeway that you have with a personal speech that you don't have in a professional situation. But I think when people go wrong, often now, they're trying to be provocative. They are intentionally trying to get a reaction. So I think sometimes that's something to measure it against, personally. I mean, if you're asking about comedians who sometimes cross the line, as a comedian myself, I support the right to do it. To me personally, unless everyone in the room is laughing, it's not funny. To me personally, that raises the bar. And if you have a joke that's on a controversial subject or could possibly be interpreted in a way or misinterpreted, rather in a way that seems as if it's punching down, I think then you need to really show your skill as a writer and a performer to make it clear what your intention is behind the joke.

Because there's a world of difference. A friend of mine put it in a way that it was just beautiful. I mean, because there's a world of difference between the subject of the joke and the target of the joke. So the subject of the joke in itself might be controversial, but the target of the joke isn't necessarily it would be possible to have a joke about trans or abortion or something like that, where the target of the joke is. It's a joke that everyone, including the community that is mentioned, could laugh, I would hope.

Yeah, I've got my own five to ten minute comedy routine and it's around trans comedy, and I tell jokes and people tell me it's funny from all perspectives. So, yeah, it's kind of visual comedy. So I'm painting pitch to people's minds with actions and taking to that journey. You're right, you can use tricky subjects if you have some authenticity in that area, so you're not trying to use it against something you have no experience of, I think. So you can use yourself as an example of the joke.

What are you trying to say with the joke? I think it comes down. We've certainly seen a lot of people. What they're trying to say with the joke is, these people are bad, this person is stupid. It's not always a great message, but I think it's definitely possible, because it's definitely possible to write a joke where everyone's laughing. And to me, that's the only reason to do a joke. If everyone's laughing, not just for a moral. As. As a moral reason, but if I'm speaking to a room of 200 people, 200 people laughing sounds better than 100 people laughing, or 75 people laughing, or four people laughing.

If your objective is to make a point or inspire action, or simply just make the room laugh, more people laughing sounds better, feels better to everyone.

I suppose we've also got to be mindful that humour doesn't always travel borders or cultures. So what is funny to a UK based english speaking person who's been maybe lived here in this country all of their lives is different to someone who's come to this country in their mid 20s, speaks English, you originate from America, so there's some british humour that you probably don't understand. You have to be sort of socialised from birth, almost, with the humour and the culture. And if you're not careful, you can crack a funny or think you're cracking a funny, and the whole room just stares back at you. And there's also generational. If I talk about Monty Python or some of the things that resonated with me when I was growing up in the modern person, probably wasn't even alive when friends hit the tv screen in the late 90s.

Yeah, it's a matter of. And in those cases, if using something like that is an example, sometimes all you have to do is just add a little bit of explanation. If you feel like Monty Python is the best example of whatever it is you're trying to illustrate, just make sure that you say Monty Python. It's a group. They did a bunch of ridiculous stuff. They had movies like this and this. You may know, even if you don't know who they are, you may have heard of this. Just give it an extra little bit of explanation so that everyone in the room can follow you.

Make sure everyone has context. I see that happen a lot. Especially for me. Yeah, I didn't grow up here. So there are references, there are words, there are phrases. Even though my partner is English, I've known for 20 years and kind of had 1ft in this culture, very often I have no idea what's being referenced. But again, if you are delivering humour on stage or you're just trying to make a connection with someone, just take an extra 3 seconds and add a little bit of an explanation. And you don't have to start from the very beginning, just enough so that the people who may or may, I know I'm speaking to an international crowd here, I mean, even something like that, give the reason why you're going to give the little bit of explanation and then just give that tiny bit of explanation.

And you can use that as an opportunity for humour. You can sort of have an awareness of your age. Oh, Monty Python. I know I'm a thousand years old. So maybe everyone here isn't old enough to remember Monty Python. I mean, you can give it context and you can use. Well, again, turn that potential negative that people might not understand. Use it as a positive, use it as a way to, well, inform and educate.

And also add the humour of self awareness. Not self deprecating necessarily, but just the awareness. People will appreciate the awareness that you're not just because that you're not just continuing on and not caring if they understand it or not. Because also, if you're speaking and someone doesn't get something or it's not funny, it's not just that they stare back at you and you don't get the laugh in the moment their minds wander, you start to lose them. And then you're sort of digging yourself into this hole where they're not going to be paying as close attention because it's not really for them or they feel as if you haven't taken them into consideration or just their phone pings, so they take a look at it. And now you've dug yourself into a hole. Now you have to really work even harder to get that attention back, and it's easily avoidable.

So the obvious time where humour can work really well is when someone's trying to heckle you or join in the conversation from the floor. As a speaker on stage, you can use comedy or humour as a put down as well, can't you? If you're careful, you can.

That's always a line that you have to be careful if you're going to cross it, because you can't uncross it. There are times the best advice I got on that a guy who was a legendary comedian saw something happen to me and then said, here's what you do. First you have to vet the heckle, and that means you have to. Again, well, in a comedy club, you don't always have to acknowledge every single heckle. You don't have to acknowledge everything because sometimes it might distract you, but maybe it hasn't distracted the whole room. If someone says something, you have to repeat it back because you've heard it. But maybe the people in the back of the room haven't heard it. And I'm now gesturing towards the back of the room, which is perfect for a podcast, but maybe the people in the back of the room didn't hear it.

So all of a sudden you just go off on someone and their friends stop what you're doing and go off on someone, and they're very puzzled, the people who didn't hear it. So you have to repeat it back, because also what has happened? And he told me a great story, I can't remember the phrase, but he told me a great story where he thought someone had heckled him, someone shouted out something, and he repeated back what he'd heard again, for that purpose of making sure everyone in the room heard it before he took that next step. Because if the heckle serves as a set up, then whatever he says to it would serve as the punchline. And you want everyone to have the context. But it turned out that's not what the person had said. The person was talking to the waitress about the chicken fingers, or whatever the order was. It wasn't give him the finger. Are those our fingers? Something that was just totally had nothing to do with him.

It was distracting. But had he just jumped down her throat, it would have been inappropriate and unearned, which is a really tough thing.

To get away from as you're talking. I think about humour as a sort of spectrum. There's the big gag that you're setting up and really sort of signposting and then trying to get this major laugh. Then there's humour, which is kind of an anecdote you're weaving into a story and the result is trying to make people feel and experience a different emotion inside them. So should you use jokes or should you use anecdotes that are humorous situation I appreciate, but in a professional talk, in a public speaking at work, you probably want to aim down the humour route rather than the gag route, wouldn't you? Is that what I'm thinking?

Well, it depends. I'm not quite sure what you mean by gag. I mean, to me, whatever it is just has to be authentic to you. And if you're not a gag person, everyone has a different sense of humour. I'm quite dry. I might comment on something or allude to something, but I don't always try to hit it over the head because that's just not my style. But when I talk about humour in a professional situation, for speakers, I describe it as a seasoning. Sometimes.

You don't always need a lot. If you think of it like salt, if you've got a very heavy talk, then just a little bit is going to be plenty. It's just enough to sort of relieve the tension, relieve a little bit of the pressure, give it some balance so that it's not just unrelentingly sad, but if it's a best man speech, there's an expectation that you're going to use a lot of salt. You want movie theatre popcorn, but sometimes it's really just. But if you put a few grains of sea salt on chocolate, it's just literally just a few grains, it makes it an entirely different experience. But if you just kind of dumped the shaker on it, which is great for popcorn or chips or something like that, it would be inappropriate, it would feel out of balance. So I think it's a matter of who you are and what the situation is.

When I speak, I'm very conscious around the need to speak methodically, rhythmically and with a certain cadence that allows people to ruminate and absorb. You speak too quickly, it's like a machine gun hitting them, isn't it? You can't take anything in. You speak too slowly and people are going, what I've got no interest in. So you're trying to find that ideal cadence and pace to keep people engaged, allow them to digest at the same. For comedy or humour, isn't it? If you're not careful, what we do is we try and rush a gag because we're nervous or we have to sort of blurt out and then we just move on quickly. It's all about the timing in comedy, isn't it?

Yeah, it's about the timing and it's really about making it sound natural again. It all goes back to feeling authentic to you. The best laughs that you'll get in a speech are the things that, well, either sound like they've come off the top of your head or really did come off the top of your head. The observations, the asides, things like that. But I generally wouldn't suggest that people put big gags in or big. It's just tough to land things like that, and it puts a lot of pressure on one particular moment rather than distributing a little bit of wonderfulness throughout your speech. Because when it sounds rehearsed, obviously you have to rehearse things, but audiences are smart, they're very perceptive, and when something sounds rehearsed, it sounds inauthentic. And that's not necessarily a bad thing.

People want you to sound prepared, and if you're delivering material, if you're delivering serious material or delivering, in comedy terms, straight, as opposed to funny, intentionally funny, if you're delivering information, then there's nothing wrong with it sounding prepared. But if you're delivering comedy and it sounds over prepared, it's diminishing returns. So I think that's another reason to sort of just have small moments and let the small moments add up.

Yeah, you've heard me speak a few times and I'm really conscious about people finding me too serious. I've had people say, you're really serious, and I thought, you don't know me very well. Because in my day to day conversations, my day to day life, I don't take myself seriously. I don't expect other people to take me seriously, but I expect people to respect that I am serious, but don't take myself seriously, if that makes sense. I'm professional with a light heart, and when I do my professional speaking, I sometimes find that a gag or a witticism or an ironic statement or something will pop into my head which is completely unrehearsed yet lands so well. I then use it again, because next time I use it, it is rehearsed or it is tried and tested. So I don't necessarily set out to write gags, but I remember the ones that get the laughs and then recycle and bring them in authentically.

It's very green. Yes, it's very good for the environment, the recycling of jokes. But I think what that speaks to is that that comedic opportunity that you took advantage of, was authentic to you and to the material. And it wasn't something where you said, I'm going to write something funny here, because that's very hard to do. I have people that come to me and say, I want you to add some jokes to this. I don't have a wand. And I could, hey, I could write it the way I would say it. I could write it the way someone else would say it, but it's not going to sound right coming out of that person's mouth.

It's a matter of drawing out, well, what happened next in that story? Or wait, you got fired. What was the ride home like? What was the conversation with your partner? What was the first thing you did the next morning? So trying to find the real moments and bring it a little bit closer to storytelling. And truth is funny, when you have an aside or something spontaneous and you use it again because it was spontaneous the first time, even though you've rehearsed it and you've put it into your set and now you're planning to do it, you probably also have the muscle memory of how spontaneous it felt the first time. So your delivery probably feels spontaneous as well because that's just kind of how it popped out of your mouth originally. It probably doesn't sound as rehearsed as something that just sounded good when you were sitting at home typing on your computer.

Yeah. I actually find it maybe easier to be light hearted or throw a humour in there at the beginning because I'm kind of just trying to warm myself up to start talking. So it's almost like an icebreaker for me, an icebreaker to the audience, to something quick. When I'm in flow in the middle of a talk, I'm probably too much in flow unless I've got something. I've got a lot of phrases I use unless one of those phrases happens to trigger a thought about something lighthearted. But I find the easiest time for me is during the Q a section where people are asking questions. Because I'm now relaxing my shoulders, I'm now in a different mode. I'm now engaging with the audience and trying to entertain them with an answer.

So I find that I'm more in creative mode during A-Q-A whereas in the delivery, I'm more in flow and it's harder to, in my brain to try and pause, gag, carry on unless it's kind of ingrained into that banter or the pattern I use.

Yeah. When I work with people, I always say that there's three places in the speech when humour is really best used and it's very, very technical, it's the beginning, the middle and the end. It's not as hard as it sounds, but at the beginning, when you use it, just as you're saying, when you use it at the beginning, it not only relaxes you, it relaxes the audience and it creates a connection and it creates an expectation, it sets a tone. And with a lot of us, that tone is, you're in safe hands, you're going to enjoy this. I mean, look, we've all sat through talks that we didn't volunteer to attend, and so you can also set a tone of, this isn't going to be painful, this won't suck. Which is really, people really appreciate in the middle, you don't need much in the middle, because that flow that you're in, it's not a matter of you not wanting to distract yourself, it's a matter of you're presenting information. It's not stand up comedy, you're presenting information. So there's not always an opportunity, but in the middle, if there is something that you can add, just a little something, and it sounds like you do, if there's one of the phrases that you say, it sort of perks people up, it reengages your audience.

Just in case there's anyone whose mind began to wander. Because when there's a laugh, especially when the speaker is in flow, when suddenly there's a laugh, anyone whose attention has wandered is going to think, wait, what did I miss? What did I miss? I need to lock back in on this. And then at the end, what I like using it at the end is something, and I always recommend people do it. It's something called a callback. And a callback is literally, it's just a reference to whatever the biggest laugh in your piece was. And it's a way to sort of. And if you watch any stand up special, I guarantee you the last joke of the set, the biggest joke of the set is going to be something that references something that happened earlier. So a callback, if you can get a laugh at the end or you can reference whatever it is you said at the very beginning, even you're leaving on a laugh and people's memories are very short, so they will remember.

It's much more likely they're going to remember that laugh at the end and think that was really interesting and kind of funny, too. Even if you've got 25 minutes of just information, useful information in the beginning with not a lot of laughs. So you're using it, I think, in just the right way. And when you get to the Q and A, you're there more as Jo the person than Jo the speaker. So you kind of have licence to relax and have a little bit of banter.

I saw John Bishop, the comedian, live show he did at the guild hall in Portsmouth, and he talked about his callbacks. He told about, I don't know, let's just say nine different stories throughout his set. And I remember one was about a llama or something, or alpaca or llama in there. Anyway, that's the one I really remember from it. And you went through it and you didn't really know if these were true stories or they were based on anything there. But right at the end, as he was finishing off, he put a slideshow up of each slide was something that related to the story he told. So I always remember the llama being there. So he was with the llama doing this and he went through it and thought.

So he immediately took all this stuff he told you and then gave it a fact. It happened. And that made the gags and the enjoyment even more powerful because you then shared that another laugh by going, yes, I remember that story. Yes, it did happen. And I thought that was so expertly done. And that's effectively a callback as well. It's refreshing that mind or putting you back into that moment where you laughed the first time, to laugh a second time without him having to do anything. He just stood there and went.

I thought, that's really powerful.

I mean, that sounds beautifully constructed. Yeah, it's really effective because it creates a sense of community with the audience. Also, think of. We have this in common now. We're all laughing about this. We've had this shared experience, and this shared experience is something that we're laughing about. It's amazing because he's created a community with the same reference points. It's brilliant.

Yeah. As a professional speaker, I find that as well. You come out, you deliver your set, your gig, your talk, whatever you want to call it, and you come out and you're networking with the audience afterwards, you can feel that shared community picking up on the things you said and they're repeating it back to you. And it's kind of really powerful to know you've engendered that into somebody, that feeling and that memory and that passion you've given them. I guess comedy is the same. You're giving people that brain chemicals and that endorphins and that happy feeling, aren't you?

Yeah. And it means you've made impact. If people are quoting you back to you, you've done something right because they're remembering what you said. Anyone can just speak and have it sort of flow into people, and then what they retain is how much they retain is sort of. Who knows? But if they're repeating you back to you, if they're quoting you, then you've succeeded, because why else are you up there?

And I'm going to quote you back to you now, because I want to hear this story again about the Dallas Cowboys. For the Dallas Cowboys. I want to hear this story again. I'm sure our listeners would love to hear this. A bit of background. You were in Iraq, as the Americans call it. We call it Iraq, but Americans call it Iraq. And I have an iPhone, not an Iraq.

But, yeah, you could tell us a story about how you went out there and what were you doing.

Well, it sounds. Especially saying it, to me, it sounds so much more exciting when you say you have a story about the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders. Boy, I wish. Says the middle aged lesbian. Well, yeah, in one of my talks, I talk about humour. Well, it's about humour as a tool for connection and how to use humour to connect with people who might, on the surface, be very different from you. And in stand up comedy, you have to make that connection very, very. I went.

When I was doing a lot of stand up, I did a military tour of Iraq. I went to Iraq. Yes. A troubled place. America had its hands all over, but I went there to do a military tour. And I also talk about when you're looking for opportunities, for comedic opportunities, you don't always have to think of gags and puns. Truth is funny. Real life is funny.

So when I did this military tour, and it was amazing, we went to combat outposts and forward operating bases and we went on Blackhawk helicopters. It was four or five shows a day. But the people at these forward operating bases, they're 19 year old kids who had not seen anyone other than the 20 or so people that guys that they were with for weeks at a time. So a lot of our job was just to be a different person. So I went up and my opening joke in front of these kids was truth. It wasn't even a joke. It was the big bases. Get the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders, you get me.

And then in my talk, I show a slide of the Dallas cowboy cheerleaders. Because in the States, people have an immediate picture in their head, but less so in the UK. But the picture is, it's 22 year old blonde women kicking their legs up in the air. I mean, they're the cheerleaders for an american football team and it's sort of a Barbie image. So there's always a laugh here. But when I say that the big bases get the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders, you get me. And here in the States, there's an immediate big laugh. In the UK, there's a titter.

And then you show the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders and I say, yeah, there's a difference. And that difference did not go unnoticed by those 19 year old marines. But that's not even a joke. It was just truth. There's no pun, there's no funny turn of phrase, there's no setup. Well, I guess there's a set up and a punchline. The setup is the big bases get the Daleks, jailbreak cheerleaders, you get me. But on paper it's hardly even a joke.

But. So when you're looking to add humour to something, it doesn't always have to sound like a joke. Sometimes just truth, seen in a different way, presented in a way that is just open and vulnerable and honest, can do the job. Not just as well, I think, better than anything that's prepared, because you said.

Earlier, at that moment, you and the audience have a shared experience of you being there, them listening. So you're talking about the situation, the context they're in, with an irony or a reference of this could have been you, if you were a different base, but actually, I'm here instead. So I think, yeah, you're bringing that common, shared understanding of the situation into that. And so the humour comes from that, doesn't it? So I think it works really well. When I'm on stage, I'm basing the humour I want to use on the audience I'm with because they need to understand it. I think, as I said to you earlier, you got to be careful around bringing humour in, into an audience that may not understand that humour. So, again, by having the context of who's in front of you, you can then target your witty remarks or your anecdotes to the audience and not to another audience where it did work well.

Exactly. And that's why I realised I had to add the slide had, because I realised that here I'm delivering in front of people who may have a sense of who the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders were, but they don't have an immediate image in their head. So that was because I was aware of who these audiences are and the differences, but the connection that it makes between the speaker and the audience. Yeah, it's a great way to add humour. At the beginning of your talk, everyone wants to be funny up front. Everyone wants to start with a laugh, but simply acknowledging the elephant in the room can do that. And the elephant in the room was a bunch of 19 year old marines looking at me, middle aged, short haired lesbian, thinking, it's nice that see came, but these are sort of the quintessential. They were 19 year old marines, the quintessential red blooded american male.

I was not their first choice. I was probably older than most of their mothers, even at 38 at the time. So I'm just acknowledging what they're thinking. But me doing that means that they can then appreciate, oh, she's thinking about us. She understands what we're thinking. It just creates that. Well, it creates that dialogue. Oh, yeah, it worked every time, which is pretty much everything you can hope for.

But I've watched you do that too. I've watched you open one of my favourite thing I've seen you done, and I love watching you speak, but I saw you speaking at a day that was dedicated to impostor syndrome, and you walked up on stage. And again, this all goes to things don't have to sound like a joke. Truth is funny, and things don't have to sound like a joke, and it doesn't have to be a pun, and it doesn't have to have water shooting out of the bow tie and the big floppy shoes and a hat. You walked up on stage and you said, almost as a throwaway, what do I know about impostor syndrome? And it was a slow burn and you let it sit there. You let the fuse burn all the way down to the full firecracker. And I could see people. I knew what you were doing and you could really see the audience almost do the math.

You could see them go, wait, hold, carry the seven. And it was a huge laugh that blew the doors off the place. It was absolutely wonderful. But again, it wasn't a big cartoony. Here, I'm doing a joke, just a little bit of truth, but I think it got you 100 times. Anything any gag would have.

And you knew that it was the truth. It was the truth, yeah, it was truth. What do I know? My impostor syndrome was kicking in and going, what do I know about impostor syndrome? It was kind of prepared. I don't know about you, but when I professionally speak, it's always about the first line or the first 10 seconds. Five to 10 seconds that grab that hook where you get the audience, and I have a standard set of openings I tend to use, and I oscillate between them, depending on how I feel. But that day, it wasn't a prepared speech. I had about half an hour's notice to go and do something and ask it in the audience, thinking, right, if I can get my first line out, the rest will happen. I trust my brain enough to be able to keep going.

Once I've got the first bit out, I'll just sit there thinking, what do I know about, what am I going to talk about? So I was sitting there in the audience, my impostor syndrome was kicking in, big tone, not knowing what to talk about. And it just came to me that that was, what do I know about imposter syndrome? It became the obvious first line, as you say, it landed well, and you say it's a slow burn. But then when people started laughing, the laughing spread quickly, didn't it? And I let it carry on. And that gave me five to 10 seconds of thinking time as well. So I think that's really important sometimes, is when I really want to work out what I want to say next. If it's not rehearsed, I need a little bit of thinking. And that bought me time to become comfortable with the stage, comfortable with the audience, set some credibility and then go for it. And then it all went into flow from there.

And it did the same thing for the audience. I mean, it has the exact same effect on the audience. But can I ask you something? As I took, and I thought that was why the joke worked. But we all see things from a different perspective. I took your imposter syndrome joke to be a reference not to just you speaking on the day, but I took that to be a reference to your identity.

Yeah, completely. I have immense imposter syndrome about my gender identity around some things I speak about. What do I know? It's less so now, because I've been speaking around EDi for about seven or eight years now, but I still have that echo of the first year or the first month or the first year where you're still trying to find your feet. And I still remember that. So it's not as dominant as it once was, because I've now got social proof, if you like, that I know what I'm talking about, or people say, I know what I'm talking about. I've got more confidence in my own gender identity in myself because I've been walking in these shoes now for seven or eight years. But the memory of those early days still stays with me, so I haven't shaken it off. It's just maybe buried a little bit.

I'm not sure I'll ever lose it in the same way. I heard someone describe it once as when you're trans, if you think about, you've got people who are native born in the country, you've got people who come on holiday, and you've got people who migrate. So there are people who are tourists, basically. They do a bit of gender cross dressing. They can't, maybe at the weekends, whatever. So they're kind of tourists. They pop in and pop out. And I migrated, so I moved into the country, but I'll never be a native in the same way that whilst you've been here 20 years in this country, you've still got american roots and your history from there.

So it's that little bit of an imposter syndrome maybe you face as a Brit, because you're not truly a Brit. I'm not truly a native woman in those sort of terms. I always have that kind of impostor syndrome around that. I'm just an immigrant into the gender, if you like.

Yeah, well, it's almost speaking something fluently as a second language. And I've only been here not quite three years. I've been with my english partner for that long, so I'm even worse, I'm even newer. But yeah, I think that's a great analogy. I mean, I always felt I was speaking about gender. Most of my career, I was the only woman in the room. In. In comedy, or at least in american television shows, there's a writer's room, it's a group of writers, and one person will get assigned.

It's a team, and one person will get assigned to write the first draught of something, and then that comes into the room to get punched up as a group, add humour and polish and things like that. And for a lot of my career, I was the only woman in the room. And for a lot of my career, the hosts. I worked a lot in comedy variety in late night, which is sort of a Graham Norton, but five nights a week, sort of a structure. I was the only woman in the room, and so I was writing jokes for the host. So putting myself in that situation, but I mean, I was essentially writing. I was speaking guy. It's not my first language, it's not my experience, especially at the time, I have never been, but especially at the time when I was in my early twenty s and thirty s, I've never been a middle aged white guy.

But maybe I will be someday. But, yeah, I've never been so I was always writing as someone else, which, look, everyone in the room was writing for the host, so they were all writing for someone else. But the perspective on the world and how they saw women and how they. I mean, it was just very male, and that wasn't who I was. And so I did feel very much that I was speaking a second language. I was fluent in it and I was there willingly. I'd emigrated, or I was an immigrant who was happy to be there. But there were times when I think my accent made me stand out, if I can torture the metaphor even more.

As you were talking there, I was thinking, there is definitely a different humour base for masculine and feminine identities, if you like. I've noticed that having gender transitioned, the humour I once was bathing in, in terms of my friends and the social circles I had was very masculine. And the humour I now bathed in with my circle of friends is very feminine. And there is a huge difference between the subjects of the joke, how women will often use language to describe their partner or husband in a derogatory way. And all the women go here. Mine too. There's this kind of common understanding. But men denigrate their partner, their wives, in a different way, because they tend to build them up and say, my wife's amazing all the time, and they want to make it sound like they got the perfect relationship, whereas wives want to say how shit their relationship is and their husband's such a low life, and that gets the laughs from a different perspective on the same relationship.

And I can pick up that gender coded language and that gender coded humour. And I sometimes find it really tricky to listen to male humour these days because it really triggers me.

Yeah, I can definitely see that. Especially a lot of my experience in these writers rooms, it was with younger guys, just because we all sort of aged and younger guys definitely have a different experience. Level of experience with women and a different level of maturity. Yeah. The difference between male and female. Yeah, I think that's a really interesting observation. I'm trying to not speak in generalities, though. I think they apply.

Yeah, we obviously appreciate we are generalising and stereotyping an entire gender, if you're not careful, and making the dispersion against 50% of the population. But, yeah, I'd use the word tends to be rather than absolute. Kind of tends to be in this direction.

Sure. And I think one of the things that you're noticing is that because women tend to be more. Maybe by necessity, I don't know if it's nature or nurture, but tend to be more emotionally intelligent by which also the humour would, I think, tend to have a little bit more emotional intelligence, often using the qualifying words and what you're talking about. Also that, yeah, women, as a lot of the male humour, or at least sort of more traditional male humour, has been guys talking about women sort of as extension of themselves. So they are competitive with one another and their partner, or whoever it is that they're talking about, the measure of that person reflects on them. It's really not about the. Whereas with a woman, she's talking about her experience and trying to get to the truth of the experience in that example. And with guys, well, it's more about just how he comes across.

Let me give you an example which hopefully you'll find light hearted, humorous. I was out with a group of my male friends in Bricklane, I think curry and few beers, whatever, about four or five years ago. And there was a certain part of this group of. We were in. Were talking about their broken noses, how they'd been in a fight and they had stitches and how they had this, and there's cotton one up their nose and all this kind of thing, and everyone's kind of going, oh, yeah, everyone's comparing their stitches and their broken noses in their fights. And I'm out literally a week later in Brick Lane with a group of women after a networking event. And we sat around the table and they were comparing stitches that they'd had after childbirth. It was both talking about stitches, both talking about that pain, the opposite ends of their bodies.

I just found that contrast, that irony in being in the same location, having two polar different conversations.

Well, and having to have both conversations while eating a curry, which I think is really. That seems the biggest challenge of all. Could you all stop talking about blood and stitches while I'm trying to eat my chicken?

But even ordering a curry in an all male group, it's, how hot can I get my curry and still eat it in an all female group? It's the flavours and the aromatics and the blends and it's a much more sort of delicacy in the food that's eaten. So it's a complete difference in dining out as well.

Yeah. In that example, anyway, it's almost an issue of confidence because the guys are sort of. It's sort of one up in. Or how do I measure up? And also, if they're broken noses from fights, then it implies that there's a story behind it or at some point, they are in some way seeking out danger or pain. But with women, nature provides us enough pain as it is. So it's pain that we have to deal with, but we're not going out trying to. It's bad enough that there's enough pain involved in childbirth. I don't need to go out and get stitches that aren't necessary, that I could avoid.

It is an interesting way of seeing the world.

Well, Beth, it's been a laugh again. I've really enjoyed this and I've laughed with you today, at you today. And you've laughed at me as well, which is fantastic.

No, I've laughed with you. No one's laughing at anyone.

And the fact that we've done this twice now, I feel privileged to have had actually a different conversation. This is largely a different conversation than the one we had before. So it's absolutely brilliant. So hopefully the listeners have got something out of this as well. So how can people get hold of you and do a bit of a pitch, your website, your LinkedIn address, whatever, on LinkedIn.

Well, I'm Beth Sherman. It's https://bethsherman.com. I'm on LinkedIn. I'd love to connect with anyone who would like to. You know, I speak about humour as a tool for quick connection, and humour is a tool for workplace balance, for life balance, tool for leadership. Just really the ways that people can use humour to be closer to one another and to put themselves in a position where their messages, whatever message it is, whatever action they need people to take, it's more effective. So if that's speakers, if that's leaders, whatever form it takes.

But bethsherman.com, bethsherman.com, it's been an absolute honour. Thank you. And a huge thank you for listening, for tuning in, for getting to the end. I take my hat off to you for getting to the end. Thank you. If you're not already, then please do subscribe 'Inclusion Bites Podcast'. If you're listening on Apple podcasts or Spotify, then please give us a, like, give us a five star rating, drop some comments in there, share the link with your friends, something to listen to on a long train journey or when you're working out at the gym. So please do share this.

I have more guests, number of other guests lined up over the next few weeks and months. This is episode 104. As I said earlier, I want to get to episode 200 at least, so there's plenty more material coming out there. And of course, if you'd like to be a guest, I'd love to have you on the show. So please do drop me a line to jo.Lockwood@seechangehappen.co.uk. And finally, my name is Joanne Lockwood.

It has been an absolute pleasure to host this podcast for you today. Catch you next time. Bye.