Find clips of Washer's funniest stuff at:
http://www.timwasher.com

By Sommer Hamilton

It’s something in his earnest deadpan expression, swimming just above the bow tie. He clears his throat to signal the beginning of the meeting, and flips to PowerPoint the first of 267. You feel forbidden laughter tickling your insides, but you suppress it: I can’t laugh at this guy’s presentation.

We’ve all been there, stranded in endless sales and accounting meetings.

Photos from top: Washer's stand-up routine on the New York comedy circuit. Middle: Performing in an award-winning commercial aired in the Northeast. Bottom: Acting in a sketch on Late Night with Conan O'Brien

But this time, we get to guffaw when the guy demonstrates his method for burying losses in a matrix of irrelevant data. His graphs start innocently enough, production costs and distribution charted over the lost revenue, then they run haphazard in a sudden burst of useless information, ending with a yellow smiley face smack dab in the middle of his data.

Roomfuls of sales reps, number crunchers and customer service providers, used to the serious stuff, roar with laughter as he flips through his entertaining PowerPoint… but Tim Washer’s expression never changes. He plays a nerdy pocket-protector character, a consultant who’s full of hot air, in corporate boardrooms across the country, from IBM to Pepsi, Xerox and American Airlines.

The point? For one, it’s about getting the sales staff to overhaul their approach to clientele: don’t inundate them with PowerPoints, or you’ll look like this guy, is the message.

Washer doesn’t mind being the poster child of corporate faux pas. In fact, it’s how he makes a living: as a corporate comedian. “After watching the absurdity, you laugh but you also think,” he says. “And there is absurdity all throughout life… but so much more in the corporate world.”

The 1989 Mays marketing graduate would know. He has an insider’s view of the business world from 12 years in sales, consulting and advertising, earning his MBA from the University of Texas in 1996. It wasn’t until he started taking comedy classes in New York, taught by such rising improv talents as Saturday Night Live’s Amy Poehler, that he found his true calling and went about applying it to the things he had spent his career tiptoeing around, those things in the office that only get mentioned at the water cooler.

Of course, as a working comedian in the Northeast, Washer’s comic tendencies go beyond playing to a corporate audience, where he shoots corporate videos and offers much-needed levity as emcee of days-long training sessions. He’s written for David Letterman, acted in skits with Conan O’Brien and played to the weeknight laughter on Saturday Night Live. He’s hosted family-friendly comedy shows such as Bananas, done work on award-winning off-off Broadway productions, starred in memorable commercials, and worked the stand-up route in New York’s famous nightclubs.

Washer takes the same sort of risks as any businessman. Only, naturally, his turn out to be funnier. Like the time he decided to try his PowerPoint geek routine—based on a consultant’s take on The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People—at Carolines, one of the most popular comedy nightclubs in New York. He’s in character, in his suit and polka-dotted bow tie… and no one’s laughing.

“Then it hits me, I look like these people’s boss,” Washer says from his home in rural Connecticut. He voices wears the same earnest expression you’ll find in videos of his performances; you can hear the stilted unease of his tone now, the naked vulnerability that characterizes his humor. “That’s when I realized that in the clubs in New York, they don’t want to think. So, uh, in New York I don’t use the corporate PowerPoint anymore.” 

Use your gifts
This is no yuk-yuk Rodney Dangerfield, all compliments to the king of suggestive one-liners. Washer’s comedy has always been clever and cerebral, not profane. It’s at home in the self-conscious, self-reflective humor of today’s fake-news, fake-reality pop culture, emblemized by NBC’s hit The Office and Comedy Central’s fastest-growing news source for the under-30 crowd, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

And that’s no surprise to Washer: he remembers being insecure as a kid and as a geeky college student at Mays, where he recalls being intimidated, at first, when he was accepted as an honors student and then as a Fellow. But he was the one with the sly sense of humor, the one who would bribe his marketing professors to mention a specific product in class—say, a brand of cereal—and then, viola, hand the cereal back to an unsuspecting roommate of Washer’s who had forgotten to do the grocery shopping that week.

He didn’t fall into the funny business right out of the chute. He stumbled into his first job the way many of us do: he knew what he wouldn’t be good at. “I certainly didn’t want to do sales,” he quips. But then his professor starting telling him about opportunities in the sales force, and through Business Fellows, Washer knew someone who knew someone at Xerox… and five years passed in Xerox’s Houston branch office.

Later, on what started as a one-year gig with a marketing firm in the Big Apple in the late 90s, Washer found himself studying a Lenten devotional guide at Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church. Rank how well you’re using your gifts, it asked. I’m not, he thought, plotting a ‘0’ on the ‘1-10’ scale next to the thing that suddenly seemed to be hollering his name: comedy. The next step, the big one, was swallowing his fear and limbering up for the mad dash to follow his life’s calling.

Ready to laugh
Be honest, be vulnerable. Those are the prime tenets of Washer’s comedy. But there’s something more to his philosophy, working in the post-9/11 world in industries plagued by scandal. Laughter is as much about healing as it is about pointing out the foibles and deficits of corporate practice, he finds.

“People are so ready to laugh,” Washer says. “For comedy to work in an audience, it needs to be something we can all relate to. Some shared pain, struggle, disappointment. I really believe comedy is a way to work through that. It’s a lot better than depression.