"My dad's an asshole."
That was Aaquib Jaleel's first joke. He delivered it on stage at an open mic in Chennai nine years ago with zero material, zero context, and zero understanding of how comedy works. The room gave him nothing. Dead silence. Then one guy in the front row went "heh." Aaquib describes that single syllable of acknowledgment as "crack." He bombed that night. Then he came back the next week and bombed harder. Then harder. Then harder. For a full year, audience members would see him walk up and groan: "Oh my God, it's this dude again."
I sat down with Aaquib for an episode of Hacking Attention because I wanted to understand what standup comedy teaches about holding a room's focus when everyone has permission to leave. What I got instead was a masterclass in something far more useful: how to diagnose resistance in real time, build trust under pressure, and take people somewhere uncomfortable without breaking them. These are the same mechanics that separate good facilitators from people reading slides. The difference is standup comedians get immediate, brutal feedback when they fail. The rest of us just get polite nodding and a mediocre NPS score.
When You Walk Into a Room, You're Not Performing At Them – You're Asking Them to Follow You Somewhere
Aaquib told me his first year on stage taught him nothing about comedy. It taught him something more valuable: how to read when you're losing a room and what to do about it before they check out completely. He went up believing "shock value equals comedy" – that if he said something wild enough, the audacity itself would carry the laugh. He was wrong. Shock without structure is just noise. Noise without empathy is just cruelty. And cruelty without trust gets you nowhere.
Here's the contract standup teaches you to make explicit: "I will take you somewhere uncomfortable, but I promise to bring you back." If the audience doesn't believe the second half of that sentence, they will never laugh at the first half. This is identical to facilitation. You are asking people to suspend their natural defenses and follow you into uncertainty – role-plays, vulnerable debriefs, uncomfortable truths about their team dynamics. Why would they do that if they don't trust you? They won't. They'll perform compliance while mentally checking out.
Trust is not earned by being safe. Trust is earned by demonstrating competence under pressure. Aaquib proved this at an Onam celebration show where his co-comics got high before performing, walked on stage, and bombed spectacularly. One opened with "How many of you are suicidal?" at a celebration. Dead silence. Wrong vibe entirely. The second guy just humped the air. Then both walked off like "Bro, the audience is amazing." Aaquib had to salvage 45 minutes after they torched the room in five. He won the crowd back by attacking a common enemy: the two idiots who just wasted everyone's time. Suddenly it wasn't "me versus you." It was "you and me versus that thing." Shared opposition creates instant intimacy. That's not manipulation. That's just how human attention works when you stop pretending everyone needs to like each other and start giving them something to unite against.
You're Not Reading the Room – You're Diagnosing Resistance Patterns and Pivoting in Real Time
Most people think "reading the room" means watching for laughs. Aaquib taught me that's amateur hour. Reading the room means scanning for resistance patterns and adjusting before they calcify into checkout. Arms crossed? That's discomfort, not disagreement. They're protecting themselves. You need to give them permission to relax before you can take them anywhere useful. Aaquib literally says it out loud sometimes: "Hey, it's okay. It's just a show. Put your hands down. You're good." It's an invitation to lower shields.
Facial tension tells you where the boundary is. If disgust or offense registers on someone's face, he pivots. If dark material isn't working but dirty jokes are landing, he goes dirtier and less dark. If personal storytelling is connecting but crowd insults are not, he drops the roast angle entirely. The goal is not to make everyone laugh at the same thing. The goal is to find the vector that lets them come with you willingly.
Here's what clicked for me during our conversation: empathy is not about finding common ground. Empathy is about asking "are you willing to go with me?" and then proving you're worth following. Aaquib has a bit about having sex while his grandmother is in the same room. It's uncomfortable material. The payoff requires trust. If he opens with that, it's dead on arrival. If he earns trust first – if he shows them he's funny, he's not malicious, and he can dig a hole and climb back out – then they'll go there with him. Same principle applies when you're asking a room full of skeptical managers to role-play conflict scenarios or admit they don't know how to give feedback. They won't do it unless they believe you can hold the space. No amount of "psychological safety" slides will fix that. Only demonstrated competence will.
Corporate Said "Say Whatever You Want" – Then They Cut His Mic Two Seconds Later
Aaquib told me about a corporate gig where the client said "Yeah bro, say whatever you want." So he went up and told a joke about playing Counter-Strike with his dad. His dad goes "Join Terrorist." Aaquib asks "Why?" His dad says "Because terrorism is like IIT." Aaquib asks "How?" His dad replies: "Same suicide rates." This joke kills with Muslim crowds because they hear it as an IIT joke. It kills with IIT crowds because they hear it as a Muslim joke. It's designed to flip the stereotype and land in the gap between expectations.
Two seconds into that joke, his mic cut off. Afterward they told him "Yeah, so you can't talk about suicide with them." He said, "Guys. You said say whatever you want." They said, "Yeah but not that."
This is what "corporate friendly" actually means in practice. Aaquib broke it down for me: you can't talk about religion (there goes 35 minutes of his hour-long set), you can't talk about sex (there goes 20 minutes), you can't say "fuck" (there goes five minutes), and you can't talk about politics (there goes another five). You're left with maybe 10 clean minutes of material that has been stripped of everything that makes it yours. Sometimes they'll say "Make fun of this boss" but also "Don't actually talk to him or engage with him." Sometimes they say "Roast us" and then immediately add "Do not roast us." You are being asked to perform the appearance of spontaneity inside a cage of pre-approved safety. That's not facilitation. That's theater. And bad theater at that.
I see this same suffocation in learning and development all the time. We ask people to "be vulnerable" and "share openly" while simultaneously policing every topic that might create genuine discomfort. We want engagement without risk. Connection without stakes. Transformation without any actual change in behavior. Then we wonder why the post-workshop survey says "interesting content" but nothing shifts six months later.
Authenticity Doesn't Mean Literal – It Means Emotionally True Enough to Land
People get weird about embellishment in storytelling. They think if you stretch a story, it loses authenticity. Aaquib taught me to see this differently. The anchor of the story is always real. In that protractor bit – the one where he told his dad he wanted to do standup for the rest of his life – there's a whole section where they fight, then other family members walk in and react. What actually happened in real life was maybe 15 seconds of shouting and walking away. Because that's how families are. But on stage he builds it out. He stretches it. He heightens it. The emotional truth is accurate: the anger, the pain, the disappointment, the clash of expectations between a conservative Muslim father and a son who wants to make people laugh for a living. People come up to him after and ask "Is your relationship with your dad really like that?" And he says yes. The dynamic is real. The "character" of his father in that story has grown over time. He's still him, but now he's a stage version of him. That's not dishonesty. That's craft.
Embellishment doesn't mean lies. It means making the character larger so you can feel what he felt. If he tells you the literal version – "We argued for 15 seconds and walked away" – you learn nothing. If he builds it into a five-minute comedic thesis on generational conflict and the immigrant struggle with creative careers, suddenly you understand not just what happened but why it mattered. That's what facilitators do when they reframe a clunky debrief into a clean insight. You're not lying. You're clarifying. You're shaping experience into meaning.
Jimmy Carr's "Instant" Comeback Was Written Last Tuesday – Spontaneity Is Rehearsed
You think crowd work is spontaneous. It's not. Aaquib broke this down beautifully: Jimmy Carr's legendary comebacks – "You can scrape it off your mother's teeth" type stuff – sound instant. They're not. After enough shows, no heckler is original anymore. You've heard every variation a thousand times. So you build a playbook. You write responses in advance and deploy them when the situation calls for it. Controlled spontaneity.
Aaquib has a bit about Hindi where he asks the crowd "How many of you speak Hindi? Are you comfortable in Hindi?" He says "I'm not comfortable in Hindi. I don't understand this language." He tells a story about calling an Uber driver in Mumbai and trying to speak Hindi like he's going to become the next prime minister. He says one sentence in broken Hindi and feels proud. Then the driver replies in rapid Hindi and Aaquib's lost. They both pause. Then the driver just switches to Tamil. Relief. Then Aaquib says "At this point he gets annoyed and calls me 'lauda.' I don't know him. Why is he calling me 'lauda.' I thought 'lauda' just meant 'yes, brother.'" Then he turns to the crowd and says "Since you all know Hindi, let me ask you some very personal questions in Hindi. You will answer: 'Lauda.'"
That feels like crowd work. But it's not. The setup is fixed. The beats are fixed. The "personal question" moment is fixed. He's just inserting the audience as if it's improvisation. That's joke writing. You construct controlled "live" space. You make people feel like they're part of something unscripted when the truth is you've rehearsed this enough times to know exactly where the laugh will land.
This is what great facilitation looks like too. The discussion feels organic. The insights feel emergent. But you've run this simulation 40 times. You know which questions unlock which conversations. You know where people get stuck and how to unstick them. You're not controlling outcomes – you're shaping conditions so the right outcomes become more likely. That's not manipulation. That's design.
The Day His Video Hit 127K Views and He Got Death Threats – Context Collapses Online
Aaquib had a video called "My Muslim Father" that went up on Standup Tamasha. It hit around 127K views. For him it was important because it was one of his first videos that got real attention. He still cringes at it now because it was a younger version of him who didn't understand nuance the way he does today. But it was real. The comments were chaos. A lot of Muslims were upset with how he was talking about religion. A lot of right-wing people were using his video to say "Yeah, you should shit on Muslims." Both extremes. Both completely wrong readings. There was one specific bit where he does Azaan and then beatboxes it. It was meant to be playful and affectionate. People said he was being hateful. He got DMs. He got threats. His number leaked. People started calling him.
It got to a point where he said I'm done, I can't handle this, take the video down. Part of him wishes he hadn't. He wishes he'd had the courage to keep it up. But here's what he learned from that experience: context collapses online. When you see a 30-second clip of him talking about his dad or religion, you don't have the one hour of context where he introduced who he is, who his dad is, what their relationship is like. So strangers take that 30 seconds and just go to war. YouTube clips are dangerous because they strip the scaffolding. The trust he spent 20 minutes building in the room doesn't exist in the algorithm. All that's left is the provocative moment, floating free, ready to be weaponized by people who never agreed to come with him in the first place.
This is the same problem workshops face when you pull a single activity out of a multi-day program and try to run it cold. It doesn't work. The exercise relies on relationship capital that hasn't been built yet. You can't skip trust and expect participation. You can't strip context and expect understanding. But we do it all the time – we package "best practices" into 90-minute modules and wonder why they don't land the same way.
TLDR – What Nine Years of Bombing Taught Him About Getting Attention When No One Owes You Anything
- Empathy is not finding common ground – it's asking "will you come with me?" and proving you're worth following
- Reading the room means diagnosing resistance patterns (crossed arms, facial tension, closed posture) and pivoting before they calcify
- Trust is earned by demonstrating competence under pressure, not by playing it safe or over-explaining
- Attack a common enemy first – shared opposition creates instant intimacy faster than any icebreaker
- Shock without structure is just noise; noise without empathy is just cruelty; cruelty without trust gets you nowhere
- Corporate friendly means stripped of everything that makes it yours – that's not facilitation, that's bad theater
- Authenticity means emotionally true, not literally accurate – embellishment clarifies the feeling, it doesn't erase it
- Spontaneity is rehearsed – Jimmy Carr's "instant" comebacks were written last Tuesday and tested 40 times
- Context collapses online – 30-second clips strip the trust you spent an hour building in the room
- You will bomb repeatedly before you understand any of this – there is no substitute for pressure-testing your craft
How This Shows Up in the Work I Do at PutThePlayerFirst
I design serious games and simulations because I got tired of watching workshops die the same predictable death: facilitator talks at people for 45 minutes, asks "any questions," gets polite silence, then wonders why nothing changed. The mechanics Aaquib described – reading resistance, earning trust before stretching people, creating controlled spontaneity – are the same mechanics I bake into every game I build.
When I run a negotiation simulation, I don't start with the negotiation. I start with something low-stakes and absurd so people can practice being wrong without consequences. I need them to trust that I can hold chaos before I ask them to create it. When I facilitate a role-play about difficult conversations, I don't lecture them on empathy first. I put them in a scenario where empathy is the only tool that works, then debrief why. That's the same structure Aaquib uses: earn trust, take them somewhere uncomfortable, bring them back with insight.
The games I design for teams aren't about gamification or points or leaderboards. They're about creating conditions where the thing you need them to learn becomes emotionally unavoidable. You can't talk your way out. You can't fake it. You have to actually collaborate, or actually listen, or actually admit you don't have all the answers. That's pressure-testing. That's what open mics do for comics. You find out fast what works and what's just noise.
I also learned from Aaquib's "My Muslim Father" story that decontextualized activities are dangerous. When clients ask me to "just send them the game," I say no. The game doesn't work without the scaffolding – the framing, the debrief structure, the way I read the room and adjust on the fly. Strip that away and you're left with a 30-second clip that people will weaponize or misunderstand. I'd rather not ship it at all than ship it broken.
This conversation reminded me why I do this work. I don't design games to make learning fun. I design them to make attention inevitable – to create conditions where checking out is harder than leaning in. That's what Aaquib does on stage every night. He makes it harder to look away than to stay. That's the only facilitation that matters.
Watch the full conversation here: