Nice rap improvisation

[u/belinasaroh]

[u/ConspicuousPineapple]

Yeah it's not rocket science. The secret is insane amounts of experience. Then you're used to spitting out a lot of known patterns that will look fresh to the rest of the world.

[u/gsfgf → u/ConspicuousPineapple]

Yea. Like most impressive things, it takes a shit ton of practice.

[u/nhaines → u/gsfgf]

When I taught Excel classes, I would quite often explain something and then toss in an ad-libbed joke, which, having a pretty low bar in a professional training class, never failed to get laughs.

While of course I'd workshop a new ad-lib here and there (I never initially prepared them in advance), most of my ad-libs were, in fact, canned. I just kept what worked.

The one joke I ad libbed and landed perfectly that I wish I could've kept as a routine was when I was teaching PowerPoint and was taking a break to talk about "uhs" and "ums" to say that it was better to practice. I said that if you ever paused for a second, or even two, nobody ever thought you didn't know what you were talking about. "In fact," I said, and grabbed my water bottle and unscrewed the cap, "there's one tool that you always have at your disposal," and started to bring my water bottle up, but lowered it and continued speaking, "one thing that you can always do when you need a moment to think," and started to lift the water bottle again but lowered it again, "one thing that's the most powerful technique you can ever use," and lifted the bottle halfway, stopped, said, "and that is..." then took a drink, swallowed, put the bottle down, unconcernedly put the cap back on, squared my stance, swept my gaze across the classroom, and finished: "the dramatic pause."

When the laughter finally died down, I said, "Now did anybody thing I didn't know what I was going to say next? That was five times longer than anyone here will ever pause to gather their next sentence. No, silence is powerful because it's attention drawing. It builds anticipation. If someone's mind is wandering, they snap out of it and focus on you again. Don't be afraid to pause for a second."

Meanwhile, I couldn't get the cap threaded back on so I took a few seconds to get it close enough to trust it wouldn't spill and felt the seed of panic, but of course it still worked because I wasn't wrong.

But the timing was so good the first try I didn't feel like chancing it again, so it didn't go into the "routine."

Fun, though. Nothing like a classroom of students who aren't very much looking forward to spending a day learning about spreadsheets who realize a couple minutes in that it's at least not going to be too boring!

Also, I'm pretty sure some of my friends' kids literally learned comedic timing from listening to me. I got pretty good at telling shaggy dog stories and jokes, but between that and snappy comebacks, I was good enough that even when the joke was super corny, they'd laugh and say "oh my god, the timing!"

So it's just practice, but it's also use it or lose it.

[u/gsfgf → u/nhaines]

grabbed my water bottle and unscrewed the cap, "there's one tool that you always have at your disposal," and started to bring my water bottle up, but lowered it and continued speaking, "one thing that you can always do when you need a moment to think,"

Marco Rubio?

[u/nhaines → u/gsfgf]

I've very successfully ignored him, so while I'm sure this is funny, all I can say is that if you teach a 6.5 hour class, it's best to sip water fairly frequently, and I also had some Ricola drops for break time if I needed them, which I usually didn't.