Once upon a time in a job I hated (and wasn’t good at) my supervisor taught what he said was a brilliant strategy for delivering criticism, something he called the Feedback Sandwich.
It was a strategy to deliver criticism in a way that would be received positively. “Sandwich” your negative feedback between two compliments, and your interlocutor’s response won’t be as aggressive or defensive as it could be. He asked me what I thought.
I told him that I appreciated his efforts to take an interest in my development, that it was the sign of a good manager. I said that I think the Feedback Sandwich is a transparent and cynical parlour trick that impresses nobody except ineffectual middle managers, and doesn’t work on anyone with a triple digit IQ. Finally, I said that I really look forward to these meetings with him. Smiling, he thanked me for my comments and we got on with the rest of the meeting. The technique has its place, I guess.
I don’t believe anyone is grateful when you hand them a shit sandwich. Nobody defines a shit sandwich by the bread and nobody eats it uncritically. The callous attempt to smuggle an insult with insincere flattery can’t work, can it? More importantly, why would you want to? If you have something to say, wouldn’t you want it clearly acknowledged?
Whatever the case, we all do this. We constantly package our language and soften our statements when we communicate with each other. We don’t even know we’re doing it most of them time, but everything we say is designed to soften the blow of anything we suspect could be received poorly.
We add qualifiers to our statements (“I’m not racist, but…”). We provide context so our interlocutors don’t fixate on the negative aspects. We choose our words to blunt the potential trauma our messages might inflict. As Mary Poppins told us, “a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.”
We consider this to be a sign of high emotional intelligence.
But… it has no place in comedy.
Your manager’s primary concern might be to defuse any potential conflict, but your comedian is focused on making the strongest possible impression with the finite number of words in their allotted time. The comedian is usually working against a literal countdown clock and has a limited number of seconds to deploy their joke bombs with maximum impact. Getting away with saying something because it was soft and barely registered with the audience is the exact opposite of what a comedian needs to achieve.
Nope, Comedians needs to “punch up” their material. The comedian is trying to evoke the strongest possible reaction. All of the “packaging,” the verbal bubble wrap and flowery prose we typically use in daily conversations only works against us.
We want our message to be powerful. We don’t want to hide our message between slices of bland bread.
There are techniques we use to increase and emphasize the “punch” of what we’re delivering. We develop a cadence, speaking in a way that accentuates the part of our jokes that detonates. We sequence and structure our words so that the critical reveal is exposed suddenly and in the spot where it’ll do the most “damage.” We choose crisp words and go for consonant sounds with plosives for the most punch. We deliberately introduce contrast (in volume, tone and subject matter) to increase drama and effectiveness.
We have a range of tricks to deploy our joke bombs maximum effectiveness. But it all means nothing if we’re still subconsciously softening our language and wrapping our payload in benign bread. I think every comedian can strengthen their performance if they can examine their communication, recognized where we’ve sandwiched our content between slices of bread and commit ourselves to deleting all of those extra carbs from our menu.
My book, The Self Made Stand Up is available as a paperback or e-book from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Books.By and lots of other places.
More than a how-to book, The Self-Made Stand-Up is an essential resource for developing yourself as an effective comedian. If you’re a comedian, or looking to become one, The Self-Made Stand-Up is the emotional support animal you need.
Sean Cooper, Comedian 