This Comedian Mastered What Makes a Signature Bit Truly Impactful

What does making a REAL impact look like for a speaker?

Well, for comedian Daniel Sloss, it looks like 120,000 relationship breakups, 350 canceled weddings, and 300 divorces… 

Within just three years of his 2018 Netflix comedy special. (There’s probably many more by now!)

Now, Sloss isn’t exactly a speaker.  

He’s a young Scottish comedian – complete with R-rated language, raunchy jokes, and absolutely TONS of laughter from his audience.

You can see his full “Jigsaw” performance on Netflix.  (Seriously, go check it out.  The relationship part starts at the 31:00 minute mark in Episode 2.) 

This wickedly smart performance – which he calls a “love letter to single people” – can teach us speakers some profound lessons about how to create real impact on stage.  

You’ve been warned.

The Comedy Bit Starts Like This…

“When I was seven years old, my dad said something that is the reason I will die alone… quite happily I may add…” 

He goes on to tell the story of a time when he asked his dad the meaning of life. 

“This is what he said… ‘Alright buddy.  Just imagine that all our lives are like individual jigsaw puzzles.  And as we’re going through life, we’re just slowly piecing it together bit by bit based on experiences and lessons that we’ve learned, until we’ve got the best picture.’”

Sloss continues telling us what his dad said…

“But the thing is… everyone has also lost the box for their jigsaw.  So, none of us know what the image we’re trying to make is.  We’re just confidently f*ckin’ guessing!”

From there, he explains that we all try to make things easier when building our jigsaw by starting on the outside corners and working our way in.  The four corners represent the pillars of our lives: Friends, Family, Hobbies/Interests, and Job.

Sometimes, life experiences mean you have to adjust things, move pieces around a bit to fill in gaps or make room for new pieces.

“Now, that made perfect sense to me when I was seven years old.  I f*ckin’ LOVE jigsaws!”

Then, he asked his father what fills the center of the jigsaw – what creates the main image of the person’s life.  His father responded.

“Well, that’s the partner piece.  You want this perfect person you’ve never met before to come out of nowhere, be the perfect fit, and make you whole… much like your mother did for me.”

This brilliantly simple framework manifested in Sloss’s seven-year-old mind to create three truths:

1. If you are not with someone, you are broken.
2.  If you are not with someone, you are incomplete.
3.  If you are not with someone, you are not whole.

At this point, the audience is silent.  Everyone is holding their breath in the room before Sloss drops this bomb.

“We have romanticized the idea of relationships and it’s cancerous…

“When you raise children in a world where everything points towards love, and everything is perfect on the outside, when you raise them for 18 years, when we become an adult for the first time in our late teens and early 20s…

“We’re so terrified that some of us will take the wrong person, the wrong jigsaw piece and f*ckin’ JAM them into our jigsaws anyway denying that they clearly don’t fit.

“We’ll try to force this person into our lives because we’d much rather have something than nothing!”

Complete silence. Then he releases the tension with a joke…

“Then five years later, you’re forced to look at a jigsaw you don’t recognize and you say, ‘ah, there’s a fuckin’ c*** in the middle of this!’”

What follows isn’t just laughter but more profound stories and statements from Sloss that make his message sink deeper and deeper.

Now, of course, I can’t do his bit justice by rewriting it like this.  You’ll need to watch his performance for that.  And trust me, it’s well worth your time.

But, what I can do is break down some of the things that Sloss does that make his comedy bit (his speech) so effective…

Sloss Does the Opposite of Most Relationship Advice Books

In trying to figure out what Sloss did so well, I probably watched this performance 15 times.  I also listened to podcasts about the show, and did some additional research on the background that led to his wild success.

Here’s the interesting thing I found...

He wants you to break up.

He helps people who are in the wrong relationships realize they never should have gotten together in the first place. This very notion flies in the face of the most popular relationship advice books you’ll find.

For instance, I looked on Goodreads to see the 83,000 books in their relationship section.  I found the following:

• The Five Love Languages: The Secret to Love that Lasts is a book that helps you learn how to give and receive love better.
• Attach: The New Science of Adult Attachment, and How It Can Help You Find and Keep Love purports that you can decode your relationship style and then stay attached to people you want to be attached to.
• John Gottman’s The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work basically uses a huge amount of research to explain what makes marriages work.  He wants you to manage your love like a smart system.

Sloss doesn’t do anything the traditional relationship books do.  Instead of giving advice, he helps people see their lives differently.  

He doesn’t assume that a relationship is worth saving.  In fact, he even says at one point…

“55% of marriages end in divorce. 90% of relationships that start before the age of 30 end.  If those were the stats for surgery, none of us would f*ckin’ risk it.” 

Where traditional advice falls short, Sloss uses this as an opportunity to help people see the truth in their lives through a powerful new lens.

He Doesn’t Give Advice

Next, I noticed that Sloss never actually tells you that you should break up with your partner.  Instead, he gives you this big jigsaw metaphor and helps you imagine your own life against that model.

It’s a simple idea that every audience member could visualize with ease.  As he’s talking on stage, the people watching can begin their own journey of self-discovery.

They’ll start to wonder...

“Oh my gosh, did I jam the wrong person into MY life’s jigsaw?”

There are no action steps you need to take, checklists, or methodologies.  Instead, he just creates an environment for self-diagnosis.  

It’s just recognition and reflection of your own situation through the vehicle of his speech.  He even admits that, 

“This jigsaw analogy will keep playing in your head.  And if it does, that’s not my fault.  That’s you thinking about the problem and figuring out how to solve it…”

Which leads me to my next point…

Easy Enough for a 7-Year-Old to Understand

At the very heart of Sloss’s performance is the jigsaw model he creates on stage.  Now, he doesn’t actually show us a jigsaw.  There are no slides or visuals.  

But he does describe it in such detail that it’s very easy to picture exactly what he’s describing.

This makes the idea sticky.

Even after the audience members left the room or the at-home viewers turned off their TVs, they can still clearly picture the model he created for them.  They can continue to self reflect on the ideas he shared because they are easy to understand.

Rather than doing what most books do, he doesn’t tell people they are misbehaving or doing something wrong in their lives.

Instead, he just helps people see that they were misaligned from the very beginning.  They chose the wrong person to jam into their jigsaw.  The pieces don’t fit.  You didn’t do anything wrong, you just need to recognize this problem and decide what to do about it.

That’s a really powerful way to help people rethink their position in their relationships.