Yesterday, John Oliver spoke on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon about ‘The Worst I ever Bombed’ (‘bombing’ is American for ‘dying’, in a stand-up comedy scenario). The story is slightly unsettling, but for me it reinforces this point: Everyone has been bad at public speaking, including every succsessful stand-up comic. This is why I think stand-ups […]

‘Sentinel 3: Homeworld’ is a fantastic tower defense game available for Android. I’ve played many games in this genre, but it’s easily the best*. Now, as well as giving me the visceral satisfaction of destroying countless alien beasties with rockets, poison, bolts of electricity (and much more besides), its required strategy has taught me a

Here’s Barack Obama last week on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. I’m always interested to hear Obama speak, because he has such great skill. After 1 minute 40 seconds, he gets down to the serious business of embassy closures and the security alert. Most of us probably won’t give a talk on such a

“The ability to talk to a lot of people is freakish”. Chris Rock utters these words when chatting to Jerry Seinfeld on Seinfeld’s web show ‘Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee‘. The whole thing’s good, but that particular bit is at 8:52. Watching Seinfeld and Rock (perfect casting for a ’48 Hours’ re-make right there) discussing courage

You want good communication skills? You need to know how to write. I can tell you how I do it, but it’s always good to learn from the masters. So here’s Jerry Seinfeld on How to Write a Joke. It’s a 5 minute masterclass, with lessons to be learnt for non-humorous writing. Note his use of