No Laughing Matter Some Business Schools Are Adding Comedy To Mba Curriculum

Did you hear the one about the MBA student? No, really.

Bret Scott, a director, writer and actor affiliated with Chicago’s Second City acting troupe, faced what seemed a very somber assignment in October: coaching graduate business students at the University of Chicago to improvise comedy routines. His hopes were not high.

What he expected were stiff, buttoned-down students delivering stiff, buttoned-down routines. What he found surprised and delighted him.

“They had no props, so they became their own props,” he said. “One group was selling Happy, Happy Dog Food, and one of them was the dog, one was the bowl and one was the spokesman. Another group sold an edible car - ‘When you get to the end of your trip you have your meal with you’ - and another the Everlasting Shoe, which they ended up taking to heaven with them.

“I was amazed,” he said.

And earlier this year, at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Paul Jacobson stood before his classmates and delivered a five-minute stand-up routine laced with self-deprecating Southern humor.

Yes, all these students are enrolled in Master of Business Administration programs, but their studies are not limited to crunching numbers and learning grand corporate strategies. Their universities also want them to emerge with communications skills, and the schools are trying an unusual approach: teaching the arts of stand-up comedy, songwriting and improvisation.

Business schools have long turned out graduates who could read financial statements and do statistical analysis, but employers are demanding something more. Vanderbilt and Chicago are notable for adding an unorthodox approach, although nearly all MBA programs are placing more emphasis on communications skills.

“It’s interesting that hard skills are considered better than soft,” said C. Thomas Howard, professor of finance and director of MBA programs at Daniels College of Business at the University of Denver. “But when people go into management, it’s the soft skills that dominate almost everything they do. They are the ones that make the difference in career success.”

Bryan Hunt had some fun on the way to career success. Two years ago, Hunt, then a student at the Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt, enlightened his classmates on the virtues of dowels. The underappreciated wooden rods actually have myriad uses, he said, in an infomercial-style routine. Dowels in red or pink make great Valentine’s Day gifts (“Nothing says love like wood”), or they can be ground up and made into cookies (“150 milligrams of fiber and only 2 calories per cookie”).

Is this what it takes in the business world? If it teaches good communication skills, these schools say, then it is.

“Recently, I met with our dean’s executive advisory board, which is made up of working presidents and senior executives of companies throughout the Southeast,” said David Pincus, MBA director at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. “I asked them what they most wanted to see in an MBA graduate these days, and the answer was someone who is articulate, persuasive and can read a balance sheet - in that order.”

Having students become Jerry Seinfelds for a day gives them invaluable communication skills and increased confidence, said Fred Talbott, a communications professor at Owen.

“If my students can handle a stand-up comedy routine, they can handle anything,” said Talbott, a former gag writer for Dennis Miller’s Weekend Update segment on “Saturday Night Live.”