It wasn’t seamless going from playing Stephen Colbert on The Colbert Report to being Stephen Colbert on The Late Show. On a recent episode of Fresh Air the comedian-turned-talk-show-host shared some good insights with Terry Gross about how he finally relaxed into his new role.
The lessons he shared can also be applied to anyone who wants to be natural and compelling onstage. Here are a few things you can try if you seriously want to win an audience. And by the way, there’s no irony intended here.
- Do less. Accept that you – not your stage tricks or techniques – are the focus of your audience’s attention.
- Satisfy the audience. Give them something that warrants their attention.
- Practice, then practice more, until self-consciousness dissipates. This will take longer than you anticipate. Remember, people rehearse TED Talks on average 100 hours until they completely own their material. Owning material is deeper than simply memorizing a script. Not until a neural pathway in the brain is created will your anxiety begin to slip away.
- Stay busy. It keeps what you’re doing in perspective. Although standing on stage may feel like a life and death situation it isn’t. The virtue of other competing pressures is that they will allow you less time for overthinking and becoming overwrought.
Here are two bits of sage advice from Colbert (italics mine) that are worth keeping in mind.
On holding the spotlight:
“When The Late Show began…I thought, what level of energy do I need to fill this space?… My first choice was to err on the side of energy until I realized that kick dancing actually doesn’t translate, and so I started eliminating things.
What you learn eventually — and this is something I knew sort of intellectually but I’d forgotten instinctually — is that you actually don’t need high energy. You need your own sense of presence and focus. You can bend an entire room by bending a paperclip if you’ve got the focus of the room. If you accept that you are the focus of the audience, you don’t need to do high kicks. You just need to be there, present for them.”
On the hidden virtues of exhaustion:
“Exhaustion is a great gift that comes from doing a show like this over and over … you actually lose all those second thoughts and then you’re allowed to sort of be yourself ….
About six months into the show, I went, ‘OK, I don’t have any energy left to overthink this. I just have to do what instinctually feels good’…. And every aspect of the show got better and got easier. It became more like me because I didn’t have the time or the energy to think about it anymore.
I’ll tell you who actually gave me a hint about that is Steve Higgins, who’s Fallon’s announcer and sort of sidekick. I’ve known him for many years, and he’s a lovely guy. When we started doing two shows on Thursday he said, ‘You’re going to love it.’
I said, ‘Why? It’s going to kill me.’
And he goes, ‘No, that second show is how you should do the show every week because you’ll be too tired to worry about whether you’re making the right choices. And he’s absolutely right.'”
So, there you have it. To win on stage aim your focus on the audience and away from yourself by any means necessary.
Read the full interview.