Stealing from the Professionals

I've wasted a truly horrifying number of nights of my life sitting 
in pubs watching comedy.

I've also attended a depressingly large number of awful talks at
conferences.

A cringe-inducing number of them were ones where _I_ was the speaker.

Hopefully this talk will help return the karmic balance for the bad
talks I've presented in the past.

When it comes to public speaking, stand-up comedy provides the most
ruthlessly darwinian evolution of speakers. A standup will do 3 or 
more shows a week in different locations to completely different 
crowds - and if you fail once, it's hard to get asked back there. 
And then you don't get paid, and then you starve. 

We can learn a lot from stand-up comics about public speaking - not 
in terms of making with the funny (which is hard), but how to work 
with a crowd, how to present yourself, and how to deal with a crowd 
that wants to have you killed.

This talk will examine the presentation of talks, when viewed through
the distorted bottom-of-a-beer-glass lens of stand-up comedy. What ideas
and techniques can we steal from the experts when giving a technical 
talk?