How stand-up comedy can help your internal communications

Comms doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and neither does stand-up. Both include a requirement to listen to and engage your audience.

By Tom Goodhand

“I started January 2025 by signing up for a six-week course in beginner’s stand-up comedy. It’s a choice that, it would be fair to say, has frankly shocked friends, family and colleagues alike.

It’s been a fantastic learning and confidence building experience – and came with some unexpected skill development, which I now find myself bringing back to the office…

Building your confidence is never a bad thing. There are no lessons in the course on how to ‘write a joke’. The course instead is about how to be more comfortable with your own ideas, style and voice.

Course tutor Paul ‘Silky’ White (a successful stand-up comic in his own right) puts the emphasis on stretching your comfort zone, accepting and celebrating failure, and finding the joy in just messing about – with no pressure. All easy things to say, but harder things to achieve without a structure and your course buddies around to support you.

The way the course is built stretches you out of your comfort zone and then creates a genuinely safe space to try and be funny (or not) and natural in a supportive, encouraging environment with a mantra of ‘there is no pressure to be funny here’.

We all joined with a nervous sense of ‘what on earth have I put myself forward for…’ but by the end of the last week, we were baying for more time on the mic.

So, what’s that got to do with comms skills?

Confidence is all well and good (and probably my biggest single take home from the course – genuinely transformational). But what I also realised is how much what I was learning resonated with and reinforced what I already knew – but sometimes need reminding – about good comms practice. And re-learning that in a different context, with a different mindset, is a perfect refresher, and a chance to re-look at what you think you already know.

Be the audience

Guess what, stuff you think is funny might not be (a lesson I learnt the hard way performing my first three minutes to my fellow students). Stuff you don’t think is funny could well be.

Take home: What you (or your stakeholders) think is important might not be what your audience thinks is important. Lose the ego, learn to listen, understand the audience, tell them what they need to know, not what your stakeholders want to tell them.

Interaction is essential

Comms doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and neither does stand-up. You need to listn to and engage your audience. You’re not barking a monologue at them, you’re holding a conversation (albeit a very one-sided one).

Take home: What are you doing in your comms to bring your audience into the conversation – is it a question, a call to action, a request for engagement? If you’re not bringing them into it, why should they engage?

Keep it short and snappy

Only the most established and successful comics get the luxury (or sheer terror…) of 60-minute shows and the opportunity to weave long, complex stories.

In this course, you’re preparing yourself for a tight five minutes. You need to edit. Trim the indulgent asides. Get to the point – give room to the messages you want to land – and don’t overstay your welcome.

Take home: Declutter your writing, lose the waffle and the unnecessary context, get to the point as quickly as you can without losing the message. Don’t waste your audience’s time.

Narrative is important

So, this is a balancing act with the point above. Don’t let yourself drown in context, but you need a narrative, something about who you are, why you’re sharing this. Your jokes do need to fit into a wider story – even if that story is very loose.

Take home: Your internal comms sits within your organisational context and priorities. Make sure you’re finding ways to ladder up your latest post to align with what matters to your organisation.

Good writing takes practice

Most of us can’t just rock up and dash out a decent five minutes of jokes, just like most of us don’t just naturally churn out compelling comms that your audience will want to keep reading. It’s a craft you need to practise and refine.

Take home: Good writing takes work. By all means, dash out a first draft, but for important comms, test them with a small audience first – be prepared to refine, tighten and restructure. Ask other comms people for their opinions and feedback. Develop your craft.

Creative block is real, but not insurmountable

Good writing is hard. Coming up with creative ideas can be even harder. And staring at a blank page is rarely a way to crack it.

The course finds ways to break through that with short, timed exercises, prompts and boundaries to work with – and suddenly you’re scribbling at hundreds of words a minute.

Take home: Accept that sometimes staring at a blank page won’t work. Do something different. That might be setting yourself a three-minute timer, maybe grab a pen and pencil rather than typing on screen, don’t edit or revise, just start writing to get going.

There are loads of creative tools to kick start your writing process – you may just need to find the one that works for you.

And finally…

All of this sounds very worthwhile and educational – and it is. But fundamentally, learning to do this stuff in a warm community of supportive fellow students and tutors is genuinely fun and enriching.

And by the end of it, I’ll have performed five minutes of stand up. At a real venue. With a real crowd, and I’m excited to do it… something I could barely have imagined when I turned up for day one.

There are, of course, other stand-up courses out there, but I attended a weekly, six week ‘Beginners Stand-up’ course in Leeds through laugh at Leeds. I would recommend these courses without hesitation.

If six Mondays in Leeds isn’t achievable for you, there are also day residentials in Wales in April and November 2025.

Tom Goodhand is internal communications lead at Bettys & Taylors Group. Tom’s blog was originally published on the All Things IC website. Read the original blog.