In a way, all human interactions are like stand-up comedy. You are speaking to an audience. You want or expect a certain reaction from what you say. If you get the reaction you want, you are pleased; if you do not get the reaction you want, you change your approach. If you don’t play to one audience well, you’ll either change your style to match or find other audiences. In a way, stand-up comedy is the ultimate human, social form of stimulus-response there is.
I present and advise for a living, so I very much hone my own skills in those areas like a stand-up comedian. Instead of “bits”, I have stories with insights around what executives should do to manage their teams. If I get pushback, I tweak the story until it makes perfect sense and overcomes the resistance. I have the same setup and punchline structure. In the end, I provide the same kind of “entertaining and informative” feeling that someone gets leaving a stand-up comedy show.
What is fascinating about the craft and the art of human interactions is that the same emotions are involved as the ones you use when you accidentally touch a hot stove or walk into a store where a robbery is in progress. Happiness, sadness, fear, anger, and other emotions are all providing feedback to you as to whether what is currently happening in your life is positive or negative (i.e., growth-enabling or harm-inducing). Humans evolved the ability to express those emotions to other people so that they could signal their positive or negative reactions to things. This was beneficial in many ways: it helped other people know when threats were around, when food was poisonous, and when they needed to support or console others. The expression of those emotions allowed for communication of feedback that other people were receiving to their environment, thus giving you that feedback, too.
As a result, you are in many facets of life using the same mechanisms as a stand-up comedian to improve your own life outcomes. You act in one way, get others’ feedback, and then either continue or change the behavior. Stand-up comedians test out new jokes this way, and they don’t always get a laugh; children test out new behaviors and see how adults react. The most fundamental form of this was tested in psychology when they put babies into a new environment and witnessed them looking back at their mothers for their emotional response to know whether it was okay to explore or not. Known as the Strange Situation experiment, they evaluated babies’ emotional state with and without the parent and with or without a parental emotional response. The present parent with an emotional response led to the most secure baby in novel environments.
The point is that you are doing this whether you realize it or not. If you wear a new outfit and people make fun of it, you probably won’t wear it again around those people. If you say something that offends a friend, you’ll probably apologize and be careful next time around that topic. You are constantly making conversation and adjusting based on the feedback you’re getting.
So, what can you do going forward with this understanding? Basically, it could be the foundation of your social development. Do you want to fit into a certain crowd? You can observe and adapt everything from your fashion to mannerisms to topics of conversation. Many people do this naturally (as most high school coming-of-age films will show), though others (like myself) need to do it deliberately since they lack natural social skills. Stand-up comedy is simpler in one regard: people either laugh or they don’t, which is much easier to gauge compared to normal human conversations where people will be polite or lie in many social interactions. It gets much more complex in interactions where there are several incentives at play, such as a person’s sexual interest, potential monetary gain from the interaction, or social status such as friendships or group membership at stake.
Probably the most interesting takeaway is that almost everyone will claim that honesty or authenticity is the most important thing in human interactions, but then in actual practice—as contrasted in The Invention of Lying when the characters tell the blunt truth and it causes the audience to cringe—they demonstrate politeness, reservedness, flattery, deception, and other means to maximize the outcome from the interaction. As usual, this blog isn’t meant to impart ethics, so it is your choice as to the degree to which you are bluntly honest or silver-tongued for the most pleasant human interactions. The most widely accepted advice, though, is to be honest enough where you don’t have to be “fake” to fit in (because that will make you miserable), but be polite enough so that you don’t hurt people’s feelings for no good reason.
Just like your own emotions are feedback regarding your environment so that you can maintain or alter your behavior in life, others’ emotions toward you are feedback as to how they are receiving your behavior so that you can maintain or alter it. The goal is to optimize your human interactions for the best outcome for all parties that you can get. You won’t always be able to make everyone happy in every interaction, unfortunately, but you can do the best you can to balance your wants and needs with theirs and try to maintain positive relationships with anyone you want or need to. There are times when you might need to disregard what others think so that you can live your best life, but when you don’t, optimizing your behavior for the best social outcome is what you are generally aiming for.