A Barbershopper’s Guide to Public Speaking
One of my fellow mock trial coaches/DND gaming friends tends to say certain things are “on brand” for me.
In that vein, the following sentence is one of the most on-brand Iain Lampert concepts imaginable.
When my dad came to visit me earlier this year, my wife and I stayed up all night with him watching the Barbershop Harmony Society’s International Contest and predicting the winners.
How did they know we were coming?
I love spreadsheets. I love performances. And I especially love weird, niche contests.
So friends, Romans, countrymen: lend me your ears and eyes as I break down how I learned and re-learned incredibly valuable public speaking tips from the international barbershop championship.
The Basics
Every public speaker needs to know their venue, audience, and (if it’s a competition) judging criteria. The barbershop championship is adjudicated in three rounds - quarterfinals (top 60), semifinals (top 20), and finals (top 10). It’s a cumulative contest, so every score from quarterfinals-on counts. The final is not weighed more heavily than the preceding rounds.
Iain and Jessica, pictured with a group I may lightly critique later on in this post.
In every round, teams of four sing two songs. Both songs are judged out of 100 points on singing (how’s your pitch, tone, and sound?), musicality (is it arranged in a complex, engaging way?), and performance (do you authentically win the crowd over with your song-appropriate enthusiasm, drama, or comedy?).
The judges tend to be former barbershoppers. There are rumblings on Reddit that having a good reputation in the community is a competitive advantage and that returning teams might get cut a little more slack than newbies for underwhelming performances. But, on the whole, the finalists are the best in the contest every year, and the top five medalists are REALLY good.
Here’s a group called Gimme Four. They’ve made finals more than once, taking 2nd place in 2025. This was one of their quarterfinal performances this year.
Impressive? Definitely. What would you give them out of 100 for singing, musicality, and performance?
Could you imagine a stronger song? Probably, yeah. How about this song from the 2024 winners Three and a Half Men?
Man, that bass is good. But beyond him, you probably noticed those meta-jokes about appealing to the judges, and that moment where the baritone says that he wanted to “Bring it back to the O.G.”
That guy is Tony DeRosa. He’s probably the best of all time in Barbershop.
The Best
(Do you know who the best of all time was at your upcoming speaking opportunity? What made them so?)
Tony won for the first time in 1992 (right after I was born — coincidence? I think not!) when he was 19 — the youngest gold medalist of all time.
And then he won again in 2000, setting the record for the highest-scoring song of all time. (New group - you can’t keep competing with more than one member of a winning squad.)
In 2007, Tony performed a final song about how he wasn’t winning anymore after his new group had gotten second a few times in a row. He won.
By 2017, Tony formed a new group — one that wrote affectionate parodies and homages to classic barbershop. They’re probably best known for their Weird Al style mash-ups of pop songs in the barbershop style. Check them out.
All that led Tony to form that group I showed you before (Three and a Half Men). The tenor wasn’t born when Tony began his career. That’s because he’s Tony’s son.
As you watch Tony’s progression, you get an idea of what the judges are looking for.
They want commitment to ‘bits.’
They want all four members to be intentional with their vocal and physical delivery choices throughout.
They want things to seem effortless and natural (despite taking a LOT of practice).
They appreciate jokes about the format itself (because they’ve seen so many back-to-back performances and they like shaking it up).
And they love it when you end with a “tag” — which Wikipedia defines as a dramatic variation put in the last section of the song. You can read that as “really long note.”
Every single public speaking opportunity you ever get deserves the same scrutiny that Tony DeRosa put into his barbershop journey. That means, at a minimum…
What are the norms of this event?
Why are they the norms?
What are our judges expecting to see?
What are our judges tired of seeing?
What special sauce do I bring to the table?
The Breakdown
When I was a much younger speech and debate competitor, I thought my special sauce was being the funniest and most performative in the room at all times. It won me a speech state championship (2010) and national mock trial championship (2011). But it stalled out in 2012 and 2013.
My prior approach reminds me of a barbershop audience favorite— the Newfangled Four. They have one of the most fervent fandoms in the community. It’s easy to see why — they are having a LOT of fun. (Here’s one of their most viewed songs.)
It’s hard to argue that the NF4 (as they’re called) shouldn’t get really high performance scores. But on the musicality and singing side, they’re just not as tight as Tony. The takeaway is that performative flair can’t take you across the finish line if you don’t slay the fundamentals. Similarly, you can be the most dramatic and over-the-top speaker in the room, but without advancing content that’s relevant to your judging criteria, you’re not going to go all the way.
You can be really funny AS you demonstrate your singing talent (as opposed to breaking from the singing to do spoken word bits). Here’s one of the best barbershoppers of all time, tenor TIm Waurick, leading his championship group in a ridiculously difficult version of Good Vibrations and getting laughs just for hitting high notes. Speakers can be funny without doing shticks.
Or, you can delight your audience with a technically perfect, authentic, smooth performance without any laughs. Here’s another top-scoring gold medal group doing Butter Outta Cream from Catch Me If You Can the musical.
The opposite of ‘funny’ doesn’t have to be ‘relaxed.’ If you can commit to raw, vulnerable pathos, you’ll be rewarded. It’s hard enough to speak when you’re sobbing, but it’s near impossible to sing. Here’s championship team Signature breaking down while singing Dance with My Father — clearly deeply personal and powerful. What speech topic would you be willing to broach? Could you cry on stage?
On the other hand, you can go COMPLETE meta. This is the 2023 championship team, Midtown. This song is full of so many references to early barbershop winners that the a fan channel added annotations to help us understand all the jokes. (This might feel like watching Avengers: Endgame and skipping all the other films, but here goes.)
Sometimes, you might challenge norms. Transgress intentionally. Two-time finalist group Smoke Ring puts their queerness and sexuality front and center sometimes at the expense of alienating more conservative judges and traditionalists. I think they were a top five team this year and were kinda robbed, but the fact they keep making it to finals proves that they’re charting their own course. You CAN show up as yourself, though not everyone will celebrate it.
Here’s the bottom line — as I’ve said a million times, enthusiasm is infectious and emotions are contagious. 2025 winners Lemon Squeezy moved from slow, traditional ballads in their runner-up year to two comedic songs (parodies of Wicked’s Popular and Book of Mormon’s All American Prophet) in their championship year. Sadly, their winning songs aren’t up yet, but you can just tell how much JOY they’re bringing at the end of this prelim performance (if you don’t want to watch the whole thing, just look at their bow!).
My Tag
Let’s end on a high note.
Maybe it’s “on brand” that I spent an entire night watching barbershop quartets and built a spreadsheet to predict medalists (I was 70% right, but Jessica was better).
But it’s not just a quirky anecdote. It’s a reminder that excellence — whether you’re singing tight harmonies or giving a final round speech — comes down to mastering the fundamentals, knowing your audience, and finding joy in the performance.
Barbershop reminded me that there’s no single right way to stand out, but there are a hundred wrong ones if you don’t do your homework. The greats know when to subvert the format and when to lean into it with everything they've got.
Here’s my all-time favorite barbershop performance. Let me know if it’s yours, too.
