Trevor Noah Pay Back The Funny Full Show
Maureen Quartaro
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Trevor: My mind was blown. And I still don't think I understood the gravity of the entire show. And I remember I got out of the taxi and my knees were weak, and I probably would have fainted if I was just walking. I'm glad I was sitting down when I got the news. And yeah, and that's when it happened.
When Trevor got that call, his work life changed. He'd spent a lot of his career working solo as a stand-up comedian in clubs and theaters, mostly in South Africa. But now he works with a full creative team in New York City. Four days a week, they make a show that millions of people watch, and I want to know how they pull that off, because usually, big groups are where creativity goes to die.
I'm Adam Grant, and this is WorkLife, my podcast with TED. I'm an organizational psychologist. I study how to make work not suck. In this show, I'm inviting myself in to some truly unusual places where they've mastered something I wish everyone knew about work.
When you have a creative challenge, the natural starting point is to bring a group of people together to brainstorm. Workplaces have relied on brainstorming for years. There's just one small problem: it doesn't work.
So what is it about group brainstorming that stifles creativity? First, people silence themselves because they're afraid of looking stupid. Second, some people silence others by dominating the conversation. And third, everyone just supports the boss's favorite idea. But The Daily Show has overcome these problems. They've cracked the code of group creativity, and I'm going in to find out how.
It's 9am on a Tuesday. Walking in, it's clear that this show is a massive machine. On any given day, over a hundred staff and crew members are working on it. But I want to focus on one part of that machine: the writers' room. It's where a creative team of writers, producers, and on-camera talent come together. Being in a writers' room is sort of an organizational psychologist's dream, at least it's one of mine, and The Daily Show is giving me backstage access to see how they start the day with a blank page and end up with 22 minutes of great comedy.
The room is packed with about 30 people. Some of them are sitting on couches, lots of them are sitting on the floor, and some of them even have their dogs. They're starting to kick around ideas before Trevor arrives.
It's November, and the big news of the day is Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore. There are a few weeks left before the special election to replace Jeff Sessions. We all know how that played out, but at the time, it was great material. They start off by playing clips from yesterday's news, and then they riff.
Max Brown, supervising producer: He's like, "I deny it. It's absolutely false. I have no idea what it is about." But with every accuser, it's like, "He was here every night." We have a picture of him on the wall that he signed.
Zhubin Parang, head writer: I wonder if his favorite booth has his name carved into it, like, "Roy Moore's seat," yeah. "I never got pancakes and waffles there," and restaurant is like, "That is that's what we call the Roy Moore Special."
The first thing I notice is that the room is full of creative bursts. Believe it or not, there's a name for that in the psychology of creativity: it's called burstiness.
Burstiness is like the best moments in improv jazz. Someone plays a note, someone else jumps in with a harmony, and pretty soon, you have a collective sound that no one planned. Most groups never get to that point, but you know burstiness when you see it. At The Daily Show, the room just literally sounds like it's bursting with ideas. You can hear it in the Roy Moore joke.
So right there, my ears perk up. The burstiness is back, even with Trevor in the room. Everyone's throwing out half-baked ideas to their boss. How comfortable are you just brainstorming on the fly in front of the most powerful person in your workplace? If you have a boss who is constantly judging you, that would be a nightmare. You'd be afraid of getting it wrong or looking dumb. But Trevor sets an inviting tone. There's no frenzy, no panic. He's guiding the group. Although the clock is ticking, he doesn't sound stressed.
They go off in pairs to write. I want to dig in further to find out how they create the ideal conditions for burstiness, so I tracked down the head writer, Zhubin Parang, and senior writer Daniel Radosh.
Psychologists talk about this pattern they call burstiness, which is, how rapidly we're taking turns in conversation and interrupting each other. There were moments when somebody had a pretty good joke and then like four people built on it.
Anita: I'm Anita Williams Woolley. I'm an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Burstiness is when everybody is speaking and responding to each other in a short amount of time instead of having it drawn out over a long period of time.
Anita: I have four older brothers and three kids who are all boys, and I joke how this explains my whole life because pretty much any dinnertime conversation, you can hear me say, "Wait a minute, let me finish." There's a lot of burstiness in the conversation and a lot of interrupting, which seems not to bother them at all but sometimes can drive me crazy.
Interruptions aren't always rude. When you're in a crunch, you want everyone to pitch in fast. Anita studied software teams working in different places around the globe. She found that the most innovative and productive teams were bursty.
Anita: The more effective teams figured out when their team members were likely to be working and they would get online at a similar time and start exchanging messages, sending each other code, whereas other teams might have communicated just as much and engaged in just as much activity but kind of more dictated by their own personal schedule, and those teams were not as effective.
Burstiness is a sign that you're not stuck in one of those dysfunctional brainstorming sessions. It's when a group reaches its creative peak because everyone is participating freely and contributing ideas.
Anita: I don't think that burstiness is unique to creative fields. However, I think probably creative fields do really benefit from burstiness. The people who are in the conversation are energized because when you speak, somebody's going to respond to you right away, you know they're listening and then you're listening to them, and so it's much easier to exchange ideas and maybe build ideas.
But of course, burstiness looks different when your raw materials aren't bits of code but bits of comedy. In the writers' room, the burstiness doesn't just happen by accident. I asked Trevor Noah about it.
Trevor: So, when I'm in a writers' room, there are two things that are happening in my head. One, I'm looking at what we're going to be doing on the show that day, and two, I'm thinking about the room as a comedy room and how much laughter it is imbued with in that moment. And I know it's extremely superstitious and no one can ever prove it or not disprove it, but I believe that laughter is absorbed just like secondhand cigarette smoke into the very fabric of who we are as human beings.
Adam: Watching you in the room this morning, I was intrigued by a few things. One, I expected a big change when you walked in, and there wasn't a lot that was different, which is a sign to me that you've made it incredibly psychologically safe.
Trevor: Well, I always believed that in any relationship where there is someone who is in charge, whether it's in a family, with a parent, or whether it's a teacher, whether it's a boss in a work environment, really what brings out the best in people in my opinion is a mutual respect. I trust that my writers are trying to help me make the best show, and they trust that I want to make the funniest show. It's taken a long time, but now, when I when I walk into a meeting, I'm walking into a continuing conversation.
Trevor: I think that's a subconscious thing, but I've always believed in crediting people where credit is due. Especially when you're working in an environment where all of the praise is bound to be aimed towards myself. So if something's amazing on the show, Trevor gets the credit. If something's horrible on the show, Trevor gets the credit as well, or the blame. And, so I think it just moves people forward as human beings to know that we are acknowledged in whatever we're doing.
Daniel: It's such a blender, like, all this material gets put in and you end up with this kind of comedy smoothie at the end that tastes delicious, but you might not be able to say, "Oh, that's my strawberry that was in there." We do kind of all understand that most jokes don't make it to air, especially not as they were originally conceived.
Trevor: It may not be the joke that you made that ends up going on TV, but it could be the joke that makes you feel a certain way that gets you to the joke that you put on TV, and so there was a line I thought of yesterday with the Roy Moore accusations, and Sean Hannity came out to defend him. And I said, "Sean Hannity has a season ticket to the wrong side of history." And it just made me giggle. Like, you know? And then I was just like, "Yeah, I'm going to say that." And so if your day is punctuated with joy, that joy will manifest itself in the final product that is the show.
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