Incentive - August 2008 - (Page 39) Imposter Infiltrates Corporate Meetings! Or By Virginia Randall How to Use Comedy During A Meeting y the second day of most national sales meetings, the last thing the audience wants to see is yet another PowerPoint presentation by yet another outside consultant. And that’s how Kevin Carroll, corporate comedian, wants it. Carroll, a former advertising executive, masquerades as a consultant when he appears before the audience. Armed with audience information and photos as well as a deadpan delivery with comic timing, he presents fully scripted, customized humor that turns a meeting into a comedy roast of the attendees. In his consultant role, Carroll combines Photoshopped pictures of his audience and tidbits about their hobbies, habits or quirks to create presentations that put employees —and senior management—on B the front page of tabloid newspapers or satiric magazines like Supply Chain Guru or Modern Accountant. “My comedy incentivizes people using humor,” says Carroll. “It breaks down barriers between people and recognizes and celebrates their strengths.” Although it gets the crowd laughing (imagine a supermarket tabloid headlined “Angelina Jolie drops Brad for Mark in Accounting”), there is a serious intent behind the jokes. “When I get an assignment, the first thing I do is find out what the theme of the meeting is and what the key messages are,” he says. “I weave them throughout my presentations, together with tidbits about the attendees: Tom has three cats, Diane was once a champion diver, Mel drove a Good Humor truck in college. Of course, I show management the final scripts so they can pick up on sensitivities I don’t know about.” It’s his role as the business consultant that gets standing ovations from audiences ranging from 30 to 1,000 people. After a generic motivational opening, he quickly introduces the latest management technique—genetically reengineering the company’s workforce. The result is an uproarious slide show of some 20–30 “genetically reengineered” employees (and bosses, too), created by combining the photos of two people into one composite clone. The personality profiles for the newly minted clones leave attendees laughing while reinforcing the themes of the meeting, all in about a half hour. “The ‘genetic reengineering’ presentation encourages people who must work together but don’t know each other to crosspollinate,” he says. “It really helps them want to get to know each other.” For example, at one meeting Carroll was asked to “clone” the young blonde HR director with a middle-aged man who was VP of operations. The result was “Skippy Calamari,” the executive in charge of “Sub-Human Resources”—the VP with the HR director’s long, blonde hair and pearls. After the cheers, laughs and whistles in the audience, the two sought each other out to compare | August 2008 | Incentive | 39 incentivemag.com http://incentivemag.com
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