No chance for a group of people to laugh at my jokes on Zoom, right?

July 30, 2023 11:03 AM

I'm going to give a presentation on Zoom. I think some of it will be funny, and it scares me that I won't be able to hear their laughter as a group. This just has to be this way, RIGHT??

I realize that what feels so dead when people say something at a group meeting on Zoom is that you can't hear them laugh, except one at a time, if they happened to laugh in sequence (which, of course, humans don't).

There will be about 20 people at my presentation, and this meeting happens, with different presenters, every week, and it's on Zoom (I don't host these meetings; I'm just going to present my thing on one of the weeks, so I can't change the platform).

So I'm just checking here: I have to read my funny graphic memoir WITHOUT the good feeling that I am amusing people --- RIGHT? (this is, by the way, a group of therapists, so lack of laughter will feel particularly, um, DEPRESSING? GRIM? FULL OF...MEANING??)

(I posted about this memoir before: here is the first part, if you're interested. I'll imagine you laughing.)

posted by DMelanogaster to Computers & Internet (14 answers total)

Best answer: So I'm just checking here: I have to read my funny graphic memoir WITHOUT the good feeling that I am amusing people --- RIGHT?

You do have to read it without auditory feedback that you're amusing people, and you're right that it's really challenging! One thing you can do is encourage people to use the chat box to comment on things that they enjoy or find funny, and then when you see that things are happening in the chat box you can take this as visual feedback. (You probably won't want to read the chat box while you're trying to read aloud, but in my experience seeing that people are commenting is at least a little helpful for the "talking to a wall" feeling of doing a Zoom presentation.)
posted by babelfish at 11:08 AM on July 30, 2023

Since these are therapists, I think you could just make your needs explicit (as suggested above).

"Thanks for coming to my reading. Since you're therapists I'm sure you understand that I'm excited but also feel nervous to present today! I wanted to ask your help: if you could please leave your cameras on for this reading, or if not, type your reflections and feedback in the chat as we go, I will feel your energy and that will help my confidence, as if we were at an in-person reading. Thanks all!"
posted by latkes at 11:23 AM on July 30, 2023 [4 favorites]

Best answer: First, I read through your presentation. I really liked it. A lot. To me, it is not side splitting laugh out loud, but rather, big smile amusing. Not sure that even in person you would be getting a lot of guffaws. So what? I think the presentation is about being you. So just be you. Read it or present it as you see fit. The audience will like it. I think you will get positive feedback at the END. When you write your memoir, you won't hear the readers laugh. Ever. They will be laughing to themselves wherever fine books are sold and wherever they are reading the book.

Also, let it go grey. You will look fabulous.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 11:41 AM on July 30, 2023 [3 favorites]

"Give me a thumbs up in the reactions if you find it amusing. It really boosts my ego. Haha!"
posted by kschang at 11:49 AM on July 30, 2023

studio audience?
posted by j_curiouser at 11:59 AM on July 30, 2023

If you can set the videos of people up as a gallery under your powerpoint screenshare, even the silent smiling feedback might help? that's been my experience doing Zoom funny stuff, also as people above have said the chat feature.

(for the record, I liked the memoir preface too & I giggled a couple of times reading this even though it is a webpage, famously the least giggle-inducing form of content)
posted by peppercorn at 12:12 PM on July 30, 2023 [3 favorites]

When I do standup comedy over Zoom or a similar platform, I get permission from the organizers to have 3-4 of the audience join me as co-presenters, and arrange ahead of time who those 3-4 "studio audience" people will be. I only need their audio on, not video. That way I am getting SOME laughter audio data, which helps me perform better.
posted by brainwane at 1:19 PM on July 30, 2023 [2 favorites]

Enable reaction emojis. I was just at a meeting and sometimes you’ll see a flurry of hearts or whatever it’s really sweet.
posted by St. Peepsburg at 3:28 PM on July 30, 2023 [3 favorites]

Presenting over Zoom or whatever definitely cuts off most of the feedback you get when presenting in-person. The extent of that depends on how other people are able to be viewed by you. If it's just a list of names, there's functionally no feedback through the presentation, but there may be at the end or via comments that you won't have time to read while presenting. The best you can hope for is to have a 'gallery' view of faces that you can glean some basic feedback from.

It does take some getting used to, but focussing on delivery and particularly pacing is important, because it's easy to start talking faster and faster when you don't have audience feedback, so don't forget to pause and give people a chance to laugh to themselves at least. I try to think about how my delivery is sounding and keep trying to resist the temptation to rush. Your presentation is hilarious, so you need to give people a chance to take it all in and to have a laugh.

Maybe, as has been suggested, enable emojis or, if you can't, just ask people to type in a smiley or something so you know they're listening and appreciating the presentation. Actual comments are too hard to follow.
posted by dg at 7:22 PM on July 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

Yeah my work uses reaction emoji for this and it's really helped me a lot, especially with big groups of strangers where it's so easy to worry all your quips are falling flat because everyone has stopped listening.
posted by potrzebie at 7:58 PM on July 30, 2023

You could get a huge laugh and the audience's empathy for your situation by getting yourself one of these and using it for your first laugh line
posted by superelastic at 4:56 AM on July 31, 2023

Nobody likes to present something personal to a list of names and muted black squares! I regularly participate in 20ish-person Zoom calls where we all have our cameras on for this type of thing. Depending on the purpose, we may all mute, or be un-muted to give real-time verbal acknowledgement and feedback.

Ask them to turn their cameras on so you can see their faces as you present--which you can do by uncoupling the participants window from your presentation window, and by parking the faces window sort of overlapping a blank area of your presentation window. (If you have two monitors it makes it even easier.) Or fit the two windows next to each other on the screen. If you end up having the participants be muted, ask them to use lots of reaction emojis, as in comments above, and also to visually react. Something we've used in online performances and in presentations is waving hands to show applause, or finger snaps to show a kind of "hell yeah" reaction.
posted by ImproviseOrDie at 5:22 AM on July 31, 2023

Agreeing that your slides are really great! I was enjoying them as a solitary experience - like reading a comic. The parts that made me laugh out load were normally the footnotes; if I was looking at one of those slides at the same time as 19 others, then we would probably not all laugh- and would not do at the same time, and that would not stop the experience from being a good one. What I don’t know if how your narration will work with the slides: will you read out what is on the slide? Will it build in layers? Will you keep in minimal and just leave people to read each slide for a few moments? For Zoom, I would just tell people what you have planned to do and go with it.
posted by rongorongo at 8:18 AM on July 31, 2023

Response by poster: Thank you for such helpful responses. I just wanted to say:

(1) the link is not to the presentation itself; those are not slides; it's the first section of a graphic memoir in progress that the presentation is about. I REALLY appreciate those of you who said you liked it! (when I finished this part, I put it on Metafilter Projects).

(2) the presentation is about the process of writing about onesself, with an emphasis on "self-disclosure" (the term as used by therapists -- how much of ourselves can we comfortably reveal to clients?) and self-disclosure in general, and particularly in the context of memoir writing.

(2) my hair is now completely gray. I'm really happy with it!
posted by DMelanogaster at 11:41 PM on August 1, 2023 [2 favorites]