These Researchers Make Stand-Up Part of the Routine

A crash course for early-career academics teaches the importance of collecting data, trial and error, and swallowing your pride. But the workshops aren’t about research and lab work — instead, they teach the basics of stand-up comedy.

One Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor says the instruction in stand-up can help participants express themselves and connect with audiences at research talks. They learn to “fail confidently,” said Charles E. Leiserson, an associate director at MIT’s computer-science and artificial-intelligence lab, which has paid for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows to take lessons. Or, in other words, persist when things “blow up in your face.”

Stand-up is far more associated with a raucous bar than a quiet laboratory. But academics — in Leiserson’s lab and elsewhere — who enjoy performing say the hobby has helped prepare them for conference presentations and invited talks, which can open up professional opportunities in a competitive job market. Similar comedy workshops have been deployed at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and at the Johns Hopkins University.

The classes can be time consuming. At MIT the commitment spans several hours a week. Despite that, or perhaps because of it, some add that sharing personal stories can put their all-consuming academic work into perspective and create needed community. Their appreciation for stand-up comedy workshops mirrors how some academics talk about the increasingly popular field of science communication — but the pressure of being funny raises the stakes.

“If you think you have good ideas and wish to have impact with them, then you need to connect with people,” said Leiserson, who is optimistic he will offer the course again in the spring. “There’s lots of noise out there. How do they know it’s worth their effort?”

Dana Jay Bein, the ImprovBoston instructor who has worked with MIT researchers, said that many people who struggle in stand-up classes come from “traditionally well-respected fields,” with lots of schooling. Besides the MIT sessions, he has done one-off lessons at Boston College and the University of Massachusetts at Boston, in addition to sessions with nonacademics.

Some people assume comedians are winging it, he said. But they soon realize, he said, that stand-up takes a lot of qualities that also pay off in their chosen fields, including the ability to recover from failure.

“The crossover” to careers outside comedy, he said, “has always been pretty obvious to me.”

Lessons From Stand-Up

The new comics in Leiserson’s lab are discovering lessons that have long been clear to Allison Matia, a graduate student in neuroscience at Rutgers University. Matia performed for the first time in high school, at a talent show. Her best joke was about meeting a vegetarian named Hunter.

She continued performing in high school and college. Comedy, she said, “can feel very personal,” as can research.

“Stand-up helped me learn I can pour my heart and soul into something, and it can be my own,” she said. “But I can put it into perspective. There are other things about me. If it doesn’t go well, it doesn’t make me a failure of a person.”

Matia hasn’t performed recently, adding that she spends much of her time in the lab. But in her academic presentations, she leans into the skills she learned in stand-up comedy. Stand up straight. Speak and gesture for the people in the back. Every word, every inflection, every body movement contributes to the point you’re trying to deliver.

Research presentations are “ridiculously easy” now, after several years of stand-up, said a graduate student in engineering at Yale University who performs in New Haven, Conn., and New York City under the name Bara Adnan and asked to be identified that way.

He finds he can think on his feet more easily and get to the point faster. And best of all, during research talks, “there’s no expectation they’re going to laugh.”

Leiserson, the MIT professor, finds that students who persist with the courses “are much more in touch with their audience.”

He, too, has taken Bein’s workshop. His material was related to parenting, not academe — including the fraught decision to lie to his daughter, then 9 years old, about the tooth fairy.

A ‘Positive Feedback Cycle’

Shahin Kamali was the first of Leiserson’s researchers to work with Bein. As the postdoctoral fellow was about to enter the job market, Leiserson saw a problem: Kamali’s delivery was flat, monotonous.

Leiserson shared his feedback, which made sense to Kamali. His first language, Persian, does not have a wide tonal range, and he knew some of those patterns were reflected in his English. So at Leiserson’s recommendation, he started taking one-on-one speech classes with Bein.

In one early class, Bein filmed Kamali, who today is an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Manitoba, telling the instructor about his morning. Kamali began critiquing his own sessions. His hand movements fell out of sync with his words, he wrote in an early exercise. He looked at the sky often. He wished he had put more emotion into his sentences.

After the lessons concluded, Kamali decided to take Bein’s stand-up classes, which culminated with a local show.

The spotlight blinded Kamali from the stage, and he couldn’t see Leiserson in the dark crowd. But Leiserson was impressed with Kamali’s material, which centered on American misunderstandings of Iran. “He delivered the funniest stand-up routine I had ever seen anyone I personally knew give,” the professor said.

Leiserson then offered the lessons to his research group. The next year, he invited his entire laboratory. About a dozen people signed up.

Helen Xu, a graduate student, participated in 2018. She felt nervous even practicing her material, and so she did something she rarely does — procrastinate. In the actual presentation, Xu realized that hearing the audience’s laughter — a “positive feedback cycle” — had made her find her own and others’ jokes funnier.

“It was the hardest presentation I had to do in graduate school,” Xu said. But she said that since the performance, she’s more apt to silence her inner critic.

Lindsay Ellis is a staff reporter. Follow her on Twitter @lindsayaellis, or email her at lindsay.ellis@chronicle.com.