February 9, 2009...1:07 pm

Courage and Comedy: How Oprah Saw Me In My Undies

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_MBB2820, originally uploaded by TED Conference.


So that happened.

Now we’ve been getting a lot of responses on how brave we were to get on stage in front of thousands of very important strangers in our tighty whitey underwear.  But for us, it was never questioned once we came upon the idea.  This post will hopefully shed a little light on our process and why we did this.

First and foremost, we wanted to be memorable and make a big splash — we only had three minutes and we felt we had a clear reason for being asked to be on the TED stage, to make people laugh.   We knew that we had to stand out quickly, and that the main thrust of our piece was a video of the Ninja introducing the United Tunnels of America, LLC .com.

We also knew that we were going to be making fun of specific noble (and Nobel) individuals (Bill Gates and Al Gore, both in the audience) in that video, but also the very concept of trying to save the world and make it a better place for us all to live.  The United Tunnels of America, encourages the elites of the world to abandon that folly and give up and go into hiding 40 stories below the Earth’s surface.

So with that we needed to instantly remove all credibility on ourselves and make us look like fools.  Hence the underwear.  The context of the gag was that the Ninja was going to show up in his undies and be the ‘D’ of TED, but instead he showed up on the video screen and mocked us for falling for the oldest joke in the TED book.

I think it’s the sign of being really creatively in sync with each other that we both knew it was what we needed to be done.  Even when uber motivational speaker Tony Robbins slipped into take Douglas’s chair as he was heading back stage to undress and tape up, we never wavered in our commitment to the gag and to each other.

And the gag serves on another level too, most people are completely fearful of public speaking, especially on such a large stage.  There’s the hackneyed advice of imagine everyone else in their underwear, and the age old nightmare of being in your underwear while giving your speech.  We just embraced that common fear and turned it on it’s head.

So that was that and there we were in our tighty whiteys in front of the world.  And would I do it again?

In a heartbeat.[/

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