Speechless

Funny business.
As the tagline suggests expect an hour or so of humorous and at times brilliant skewering of the bane of our professional existence: PowerPoint.
Proves that indeed with little prep you can sell yourself an expert on anything no matter how ridiculous and absurd. Which is a little like corporate American itself.
Judging by how much we laughed you could say funny business is booming.

Just saw Speechless for a third time last week and although past shows have had the highs and lows that are to be expected from improv, this last episode was just shy of a total trainwreck.
Since they solicit audience participation I will offer my two cents on how to avoid such calamity.
1. Let the speaker choose the type of presentation. Yes, spinning the wheel is fun, but speakers would get better traction if they had some kind of head start. They still have to deal with ridiculous audience suggestions and even more ridiculous slides they’ve never seen. This way they’d have some solid ground to perch on. It’s painful to watch someone flailing around rudderless and going under.
2. Pick up the pace by limiting slides to four instead of five. Also, the complicated charts and graphs are almost never funny.
3. If the first two presenters bomb, bringing out an audience volunteer probably isn’t going to improve things. Also, they should be limited to three slides, max. Training wheels.
4. Let the audience in on the joke. I bring a large group of international business English students every time, and while it’s understood they won’t get a lot of cultural references, it would be great if the speaker had some concept of the world outside his junior high locker room. If you want to mine repugnant non-​existent sexual practices for laughs, it might help if you walk the uninitiated through what those practices involve rather than just referencing them by name.
5. On a positive note: The MC is reliably funny and the judges showed up (though barely).