Why stand-up comedy is closer to software engineering than you think

By balki | August 8, 2021 | 0 Comment

I proudly showcase on my website and on LinkedIn that “Standup Comedy is my #1 passion”.  That statement is definitely true, but also an aspirational one.  If I say it enough times and if enough people ask me about it, I will make it happen kind of way, you know?

I started to explore standup comedy over a decade ago when a dear colleague said “Balki you are funny, you should be a standup comedian.  But you laugh too much and that’s not good for comedians”.  Challenge accepted!  I didn’t do much about that for several more years.  That all changed when I entered my 30s aka my mid-career crisis according to my partner 🙂  All the self-help books were reminding me to do something beyond my primary profession (obviously software engineering) and I wanted to find something tangential from coding.  And I somehow settled on standup comedy.  I promptly did the research and found a coach + training program.  My first (and only) teacher Alex Falcone happened to be… you guessed it, a former Software Engineer.  And he immediately declared that I have to leverage my software engineering talents more than I wanted to succeed as a comedian.

And the reality is StandUp Comedy has a lot in common with Software Engineering than I ever thought. Both are creative endeavors where I had to apply iterative learning, rigor, proven formulas and patterns  for success.  In fact the primary stereotype attributes associated with software engineers directly help you succeed as a comedian:  Introversion, attention to detail,  and seeking perfection.

Some similarities between software and comedy

Iterative improvement 

The best of the best comedians practice incessantly solely to get feedback. They go to open mics even if there is 5 people in the audience and even if all 5 of them are comedians who are judgmental pricks.  A good comedian’s mere purpose is to deliver a new joke, assess the feedback and calibrate the next time.  Do that 100s or 1000s of times and you got yourself a powerful set!  Does that process ring a bell to my software nerds?  Yes, that’s MVP (Minimum viable Product) for you agilists. Put something small to a minimum audience and iterate your way to a successful release.

Simple principles

Alex, my coach constantly reminded us of the most common formula for standup success.  

• “No build-ups necessary, deliver your punchlines early and often”
• “use callbacks deliberately and rarely”
• “tickle your audience with paradox” etc.  

Believe it or not, software development is similarly based on such simple formula.  The very essence of software can be boiled down to very simple of principles/formulas: DRY – Don’t Repeat Yourself, KISS – Keep it Simple Stupid, YAGNI – You’re not Gonna Need It are some fundamental formulas simple yet powerful.

Patterns in comedy 

Comedic patterns are similar to formulas.  Successful comedians deploy their patterns to their audience delight

• Triples pattern: Use two perfectly logical words followed by a third absurdity, breaking the audience assumptions”,
• Observation-recognition pattern: Discover something we do in our everyday lives and put it under a magnifying glass and relive it with healthy doses of exaggeration.

And all of us about design patterns are the building blocks of software engineering: Singleton pattern, Factory pattern, Publish/subscribe pattern etc.

You see I started my journey to standup comedy to get some relief from software but quickly ended up on doubling-down on the same attributes.  Story of my life 😉

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