Learn to Bomb Gracefully

I used to open my open mic sets with jokes about my own name. Growing up as Rolf gave me plenty of material, and all of it struck me as hilarious.

The room disagreed. Nobody knew me, so my name meant nothing to them. I had built my opener around the one detail nobody else in the room shared.

So I rewrote it. Everyone has a name, and everyone remembers the name game from grade school. The new bit follows a kid I grew up with, Tucker, who somehow always got skipped when we played it. Run it through in your head, slowly, and you'll understand why.

That version kills nine times out of ten. The premise moved from my life to everyone's, and once the whole room shared it, they followed me anywhere.

Over my career, I've found that design presentations work the same way.

A design review is a set

Stand-up comedy and design presentation share a job. You take an idea that lives in your head and make a room of people feel it too. The craft transfers almost one to one, and so does the vocabulary.

• The open mic: small, honest rooms where comics test new material. For designers, that's the crit, the Slack thread, the hallway.

• The special: the taping, where everything has to work. For designers, that's the exec review or the launch.

• The tight five: your best five minutes, tested and trimmed until every line earns its spot.

• The callback: a return to something the room already bought into.

• Crowd work: turning to one person and asking them something directly.

• The light: the signal to land your last joke and get off stage.

You'll hit every one of these in a design review this quarter.

Find your "opener" in your work

More than once, I've brought my most nuanced thinking into an executive review and watched the room's interest fade faster than I could explain it.

Executives want to know what a design will achieve. How it works, and how clever it is, belong in the crit. Open with the mechanics and you're telling jokes that no one yet cares about. The room starts to wonder whether you understand their problem at all, and that's how trust leaks out of a meeting.

In previous roles, I strived to find the name game, before I moved to stage time. [Premise] Partners had nothing to log into. [Relatable feeling of frustration]Getting one answer meant checking roughly 25 places, and implementation coordinators stitched it together by hand. [Journey]I built a data flow model that showed the whole system in one picture, and it gave every discipline in the room the same view of the problem. Once everyone shared the premise, the screens had a room ready for them [Punchline tag, tag, tag etc.].

Read the case study.

That's the job of your tight five. Lead with the shared problem and what solving it will achieve. Save the clever parts for the rooms that ask.

Work it out at the open mic

No comic tests a new joke during their special. They work it out at open mics, in small rooms, in front of people who owe them nothing. By taping night, every line has survived a dozen rooms.

Designers tend to do the reverse. We polish in private, then debut our riskiest idea in front of the people with the most power to kill it.

AI makes open mic material cheap. You can stand up three directions before lunch. It also has a habit: it jumps straight to hi-fi. Polished screens tell people the decisions are made, so they react to button colors and skip the idea underneath.

Tell the model to drop the fidelity. Ask for grayscale, sketch weight, placeholder copy, and a "rough take" label across the top. Then take it to the small rooms. Your peers will catch the craft problems. People further from the work will tell you whether the premise lands at all, and they sit closer to your executive audience than your peers do.

You find out afterward

Silence on stage tells you something went wrong. It rarely tells you what. Sometimes the idea is too complex and the room needs more time with it. Sometimes the delivery carries the wrong tone. Sometimes the audience hasn't adjusted to your style yet.

I don't diagnose any of that on stage. I find out afterward. I record every set and measure how long each joke takes to get a laugh. Then I log the room: the temperature, the crowd size, whether table service was working through my set. A joke that dies in a half-empty, overheated room on a Tuesday hasn't proven anything yet.

I built a small tool for that process called the Comedy-er. I made it for open mic comics, but get creative. It works on a crit just as well.

Design reviews deserve the same post-show. Note who was in the room and which meeting they came from. Note the time of day, who just got bad news, and where attention drifted. Then judge the idea apart from the conditions it faced.

Presenting without a stage

Plenty of your sets in 2026 happen in Slack or email, with no faces to read. The stage still exists. The signals move.

Three are worth tracking:

1. Time to first response. This is your laugh latency. A fast reply usually means the idea connected. A slow one means it's waiting behind something else, or it missed.

2. The kind of response. An emoji is polite applause. A question is a laugh, because someone leaned in. An objection is a heckle, and hecklers were at least listening.

3. Where the thread forms. The frame or paragraph that draws replies is where your idea actually lives. Sometimes it's the part you treated as filler.

Log the room here too: the day and hour you posted, and what else hit the channel that afternoon.

Text also strips your delivery. I lean sarcastic, and I've had dry asides land as digs. State your intent plainly up top ("rough take, gut reactions by Thursday") and reread the post once for anything with an edge.

When a post sits in silence, skip the bump. "Any thoughts?" asks the whole channel to rescue you. DM one person a pointed question about one part. That's crowd work, and it works in text too.

Bomb gracefully

When a joke dies, the worst move is to name it. "Well, that was awkward" turns one quiet moment into the room's whole memory of your set. Reviews work the same way, and "whoops" amplifies every miss. If someone points out a real mistake, own it plainly and keep going.

What comes next matters more. I used to walk into reviews trusting my ability to improvise, and I could facilitate almost any conversation in the moment. What I couldn't control was fallout that would occur if I wasn't fully prepared. That's where stakeholder trust drains. People forget a weak concept. They remember how you took the feedback.

Bombing gracefully means listening harder and asking better questions, and better questions come from preparation. Before any review that matters, write down what you'll ask if it goes sideways. The wording does most of the work:

• "What would have to be true for this to work for you?" It moves the conversation from a verdict to conditions. People stop defending a no and start describing a yes.

• "If we shipped this tomorrow, what would worry you first?" The hypothetical gives people permission to name risks without attacking your work, and "first" forces a priority.

• "What are we solving for that this misses?" "We" puts you on the same side of the table, and it surfaces the goal nobody said out loud.

Notice what's missing: "Do you like it?" and "Why don't you like it?" Taste questions invite a shrug, and "why" puts people on defense. Every question above asks the room to help you find the truth. That proves you're the person who won't stop looking for it.

Crowd work and the light

Plenty of comics call crowd work a lazy way to win back a room. In a two-hour workshop, it's the right tool. When eyes drift to laptops, ask the person whose team owns the problem which step burns the most time. One direct question pulls everyone back, because everyone realizes they might be next.

Then watch for the light. In a club, the host flashes it to say: last joke, wrap it up. Sometimes the audience gives you the light before the club does. In a review, the light looks like an executive checking the clock, questions turning tactical, or a calendar notification sliding across the shared screen.

When you see it, skip the rest of the deck. Land your ask and get off stage. Nobody ever complained that a review ended early.

The tight five

Here's this post as a tight five. Find the common ground before you get clever. Test new material in small rooms, at low fidelity. Find out afterward why it landed or didn't. Skip the apology for the silence and ask better questions. When the light comes on, land the ask.

My name jokes had to die before the name game could kill. Your ideas deserve the same reps.

If this landed, or you've got your own story of a review gone sideways, connect with me on LinkedIn. I'd like to hear it.