What we can learn from standup comedy

At Thursday afternoon's Comedy Circus Showdown, I showed clips from 5 of my favorite comedians--Mitch Hedberg, Demetri Martin, Daniel Tosh, Arj Barker, and Jim Gaffigan, and everyone voted at the end to determine whose material would be featured on the stairwell chalkboard where Demetri Martin's comedic artwork currently resides. Well, we came out with a three-way tie, with 3 votes each for Arj Barker, Daniel Tosh, and Demetri Martin. Here are their clips:






(Link to the original video we showed, which does not allow embedding: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hSe24Lmgbs&feature=related )


The three-way tie highlights the fact that not everyone responds the same way to each comedian's material, just as consumers will not have the same responses to different companies' offerings. All of these comedians are in the business of making people laugh, but each has his own style that differentiates him from the cliche "Airplane food sucks! Women and men are different!" traps that so many lesser comedians fall into. And what's great about these comics is that they can actually take a seemingly worn-out topic but deliver it in a fresh way. Daniel Tosh and Arj Barker both did jokes about Google, and both were good in their own right.