Thursday, December 1, 2016

Day 8: Boredom and other issues

"Boredom is the shadow of boring people". This is a quote I learned from Dana in today's class. Many times we are 'stuck' in situations (such as waiting in a doctor's office). This situation is different from being bored. In order to address the issue of bored audience, the speaker should first take a look at himself.

I gave a talk about computer scientists in today's class. More precisely, it was about wrong perceptions about what computer scientists do. Next week, I will repeat this talk in an open-mice session. Also, Dana is planing for me to perform in a karaoke session (this is something I am not doing well even in Persian).

We watched the video of my today's talk. I am more comfortable with my body movements. I was joking that my body movements are at least better than Bill Cunningham, an extremely conservative radio host whom I learned about when driving to Montreal last weak. He apparently uses his hand movements to intimidate his audience, which is quite non-academic. Here, you can find an example (jump to 1:40). To connect with your audience in academia, you should fill the gap and make a bridge (via, e.e., a joke). This practice will be a good start for a critical discussion (and is widely different from talking with people who already agree with you in a conservative radio-show).

Dana asked me to listen to Dave Chappelle monologue on Saturday-night-live which happened on the Saturday after election. Dave apparently is an independent stand-up who rejected a 50-million dollars to perform a TV show to skip the pressure. He decided to go to Africa for a while, and now he is back with new innovative comedy.

I just enrolled in Dana's 'Intro to Standup' in ImprovBoston. It is going to be fun!

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