The late night talk show is a tradition as old as television. For generations we’ve come together to gawk at our favorite stars. Watch, slack-jawed and wide eyed, as they regal us with stories of glitz, glamour, and the good life.
Unfortunately, I could never join the club.
For me, the talk show represented a shameless form of star worship. How could a serious consumer of culture enjoy them? The fake laughter. The manufactured drama. The over the top host. It all screams phony!
But recently I’ve reconsidered…
Talk shows are one of the few remaining forms of oral storytelling consumed on a wide scale. Sure, they may be canned and corny, but they offer actionable lessons on how to create character, build anticipation, and empathize with an audience. These are techniques anyone who writes for a living, or just wants to improve their ability to tell a story, can benefit from.
In this article, I’ve compiled seven annoying but effective Talk Show tips for telling a story. These tips work across storytelling mediums — oral, writing, film-making. Below I’ve listed each technique, provided a video of a celebrity using it, and broken down how you can put them into practice. Check it out below:
Trick 1: Make It Relatable
Telling a good talk show story is like walking a tightrope between two points. On one end, we enjoy extravagant tales. Viewers tune in every week because celebrities fascinate us. Who doesn’t crave a peek into the lives of the rich and powerful?
On the other end, we need to relate to some part of the story. Celebrities enjoy luxuries alien to most of us. Think private catering. Mountains of fan mail. An army of personal assistants. A skilled storyteller must explain this lavish lifestyle in a way the average Joe or Jane can understand.
Take the clip above from Nirvana Drummer and Foo Fighters’ front man Dave Grohl. His story is ridiculous even by talk show standards. It’s about the time he jammed with Paul McCartney and Taylor Swift at a private party.
Unless you’re Rock royalty, you’ve probably never had a similar experience. But Dave hooks us in by mentioning how much he idolized Paul McCartney growing up, and revealing “he learned guitar through playing Beatles songs.” This detail transforms the experience from something foreign (partying with rock stars) to something relatable (being a child and looking up to your hero).
Celebrity or not, your first job as a storyteller is to build this type of rapport. Your story likely contains people, places, and problems unfamiliar to the audience. To bridge the gap, find feelings, themes, and experiences they can relate to, and highlight them early and often.
If you’re telling a story about surfing with your brother, don’t fixate on insider details about how to catch waves. Instead, focus on your relationship with your sibling, the thrill of trying something new, the fear and triumph that comes from breaking outside your comfort zone. The audience can grasp onto these details. They invite them to bring their unique experiences into your personal story.
Trick 2: Highlight Your Imperfections
Failed auditions. Awkward run-ins with fans. Cringeworthy childhood photos. These are talk show fodder. When the cameras roll, celebrities go the extra mile to dress themselves down and remind us that fame absolves no one from life’s embarrassments.
Actress Jennifer Lawrence is a master at playful self deprecation. In the clip above, she admits wetting the bed into her teens. To make matters worse, she was so oblivious that she bragged about it to her friends.
This type of self deprecation is especially powerful when used by someone high-status. It reminds us that fallibility is our connective tissue — life’s great equalizer. It affects both the extraordinary and the painfully ordinary. Each of us, no matter how rich or famous, are imperfect people trying our best in an imperfect world.
In your own stories, this means acknowledging the imperfections of your character. If you’re being light-hearted, talk about something embarrassing that happened to you (bonus points if it’s an experience relatable to your audience). If you’re aiming to uplift, reveal a shortcoming and tell a story about how you succeeded in spite of it.
In a fictional story, have your character humble themselves for the audience. You need not make them goofy or groveling — there is a difference between pity and empathy. But make them human. Give them scars to show and challenges to overcome. Give us someone to root for!
Trick 3: Name Drop
No talk show appearance is complete without at least a dozen name drops. Over the course of an interview even modest stars feel compelled to shout out the directors they’ve worked with, their cool co-stars, all the way down to their hair stylist. It’s a fun way of reminding the audience: “I live a cool life and have the Rolodex to prove it.”
In the clip above comedian Bill Hader and host Jimmy Kimmel spend two minutes bonding over their famous friends and team of assistants before Hader regains his self-awareness and remarks “wow we sound like a bunch of jerks.”
While some find this not-so-subtle form of boasting distasteful, most of us enjoy it. The dirty truth is underneath polite appearances we’re natural voyeurs and gossips. There is a reason tabloid magazines line grocery aisles and TMZ cracks millions of visitors a month. Even being a second hand observer of celebrity life gives us a giddy feeling. It’s like being a fly on the wall of a party we didn’t get an invitation to.
If you’ve rubbed shoulders with someone noteworthy, drop their name. This doesn’t have to be a Hollywood A-lister, but it should be someone the audience recognizes: the owner of your company, a notorious member of the family, a local celebrity. Simply dropping the right name in the right situation is enough to grab an audience’s attention.
You can apply this trick in fiction by building a character’s notoriety off screen. Establish their reputation before introducing them to the audience. Better yet, initiate your fans into an exclusive group or fictional fraternity. Make them feel a part of a cool cabal of characters they’d be proud to brag about.
Trick 4: Start With A Tease
“Why were you in prison, Chris Hemsworth?”
This question, taken from the video above, is an example of a tease. A tease occurs when someone sets up a story by hinting at an exciting piece of information to come. In the world of talk shows, the host and guest work in tandem to tease the story. The host will often ask a canned question to bait the guest into revealing something about themselves.
Is it a cheap trick? A little bit. But it’s an effective one. A well-told tease lays out the premise of the story, letting the audience know what to expect. And creates anticipation by suggesting, but not disclosing, the action to come.
In your personal stories you can follow the Chris Hemsworth example and tease with a question. Set yourself up by presenting a premise like this.
“Have I ever told you about the time a group of Hare Krishna’s held me up at gunpoint?”
The tease doesn’t need to come as a question. Draw in your audience by starting in the middle of the action, or the moment before the action starts. See the example below from Hunter S Thompson’s Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas.
‘We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold’
On the smallest scale, a tease can be a single word. Think “Rosebud” in Citizen Kane. The protagonist’s dying words act as a catalyst for the story. Orson Welles teases us with “Rosebud” then spends the rest of the film traveling back in time to understand the meaning.
Trick 5: Confirm Character
Being a celebrity, in part, means playing a character. Crafting a public persona based on your body of work, press appearances, and private affairs. This character can be everyone from the reckless playboy. To the quirky nice gal. To the honest “every man”.
Celebrities use talk shows as a public space to build their character. Having a widely watched platform allows them to divulge information that stresses the parts of their personality they want known to the world.
In the video up top Tina Fey talks about a recent fender bender. Her GPS got nixed up, and clueless Tina crossed three lanes of traffic to make her turn. This story connects with the audience for several reasons. First, it’s entertaining. But on a deeper level the story connects because it underscores Tina Fey’s most likable traits.
Stories like this bond the subject and audience. It gives us the impression we truly know someone. A feeling similar to the one we get with an old friend or family member. The kind that makes us smirk to ourselves and think “she would TOTALLY do that.”
Confirming character is easiest to do when the audience knows something about the person in question. If you’re telling a story about yourself, highlight or exaggerate an obvious part of your personality. For instance, if you’re clumsy, tell a story about the time your legs buckled out, and you broke a family heirloom.
This takes more work if the audience is unfamiliar with your character. As the storyteller, it is your job to feed them information about who your character is, what sets them off, the quirks that get them in trouble again and again.
Once the audience knows the character’s temperament, put them in situations which heighten it. We love this! Take Homer Simpson. His clueless, dopey antics have cracked up audiences for 32 seasons. His character can stay constant, as long as writers put him in new situations each week.
Trick 6: Play Against Character
Wait! Doesn’t this contradict the trick above? Yes and no.
As an audience, we have two conflicting needs in a story: stability and change. Confirming character appeals to the first need. It gives us the warm and cozy feeling that comes with familiarity. However, too much familiarity bores us. To remain interested, we need surprise, change, contradiction.
Celebrities meet both needs by telling stories that play to their public image (see above) and ones that go against it. An example of this would be a badass action star talking about fostering puppies in their spare time. Or a normally withdrawn actress sharing a time she went loose at a party.
We know Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as an iron bodied wrestler. So it surprises us when he blabs about his monthly cheat meal — the rare occasion when he ignores his strict diet and pigs out. The surprise goes further when he reveals he eats his meal “alone like a troll”, not something you expect from someone cool and composed like The Rock.
In your own stories, toy with the audience’s expectations by sharing a time you broke character. Talk about something you’ve done that contradicts people’s perception of you. Paint a more complex picture of yourself, one that surprises even the people closest to you.
In a more traditional narrative, playing against character requires creating a character the audience thinks they know, then having them do the unexpected. This is a delicate trick. If someone acts completely out of character, we don’t buy it. But when done well, this is perhaps the most impressive feat a storyteller can pull off.
Take the television series Breaking Bad. The thrill of the show is watching Walter White’s character transform from balmy chemistry teacher to ruthless drug dealer with one improbable act after the other.
Trick 7: Go Beyond Words
For our last trick, let’s revisit one of the most notorious talk show appearances of all-time. To jog your memory, I’ll leave this picture:
For those unfamiliar, this is Tom Cruise’s couch jumping, love gushing, and all around cringe inducing appearance on the Oprah Winfrey Show. Truth be told, I don’t remember a word Tom Cruise said during the interview. But the image of him flailing around in a near-manic hysteria is forever branded in my brain.
Is there a lesson to learn in Tom’s theatrics? I think so. It proves the words spoken only tell part of a story — often a small part. Science backs this up. A recent study found at least 70% of communication is non-verbal. What we say is not as important as what we do when we speak. Our actions, movements, intonation, and physicality.
For a better example, check out the clip of Breaking Bad’s Bryan Cranston recounting the time he and his wife got caught making love on their honeymoon. Observe how Cranston shifts his voice and body to highlight different parts of the story. Notice how he stimulates our senses so we feel like we’re present at the scene.
For oral stories, follow Cranston’s lead. Raise your voice to create emphasis. Lower it to build tension. Move your hands to create and close space. Contort the body so the audience can see what’s happening.
To produce a similar effect on page or screen, reveal setting and character by evoking the senses. Never convey motivation and emotion through words. Instead of having someone say how they feel, have them express it through movement, action, body language. The written and spoken word are a tiny part of how we exchange information. Look for visceral ways to engross your audience.