“Once you get that first laugh, they’re fine,” says McIntire Professor Marcia Pentz. “But until that first laugh, they’re panicked. It’s blind panic.”
She is describing the critical moment when students in her Advanced Business Speaking class step in front of their peers to deliver the course’s final exam: three minutes of original stand-up comedy. It sounds like a prank. It is very much not. Just like all of the assignments in the course.
And students who walk in thinking they can coast on natural charm or a history in the theater arts will find Pentz ready for them. “I know what they’ve done in the past,” she says, “but I’m not letting them in and just giving them an automatic A.”
Welcome to what is perhaps the most unexpectedly rigorous elective at McIntire, where Shakespeare, a cappella singing, motivational speeches, and comedy routines all serve one serious purpose: transforming students into genuinely compelling communicators.
Pentz has been teaching the elective for more than 20 years. It’s attracted Commerce students alongside Engineering majors, international exchange students, and students from across Grounds who are simply trying to become better communicators. The class, which has grown to around 30 students over time, usually includes about 20% who come from outside McIntire, a balance that is very much by design. That variety of perspectives helps to shape the class experience with varied backgrounds and an engaging mix of shared personal stories and points of view.
Over two decades, Pentz’s course has evolved into something that’s understandably legendary on Grounds and far beyond. The skills compound in ways graduates tend to notice long after they have graduated, and word travels accordingly. Students who took the class years ago send peers and housemates back to her course. At one point, she noticed a lengthy string of exchange students from both Germany and the Netherlands. She asked one why that was, and he told her a former student had taken the course five years earlier. “You’re very big in Rotterdam,” he said.
Just Sing, Sing a Song
Pentz starts off the semester by dropping students in the proverbial deep end, kicking off with what she cheerfully admits could be one of the hardest assignments of all: singing a cappella, solo, in front of the class. No musical accompaniment. No backing tracks. Just you, a tune, and the charged silence of a room full of your peers.
To prove her point, Pentz always goes first. “I don’t ask them to do what I wouldn’t do,” she says, “so I sing, and everybody sounds great after that. They become so much more relaxed.”
From there the assignments build deliberately: a personal “story of you,” a crisis communications group presentation in which students collaborate to act as a company’s emergency response team, and a research pitch that challenges each student to break down something genuinely complex in their area of expertise for a general audience.
Shakespeare, Swords, and the Speech That Changes the Class
Midway through the semester, things get dramatic.
Students are tasked with choosing a Shakespearean monologue or scene, costuming themselves accordingly, and taking to the Rouss & Robertson Halls Courtyard to perform. Sign-up sheets prevent students from landing on the same bits to ensure there aren’t a bunch of Hamlets, Romeos, and Juliets. Yet that hasn’t been a concern, as over the years, students have performed some deep-cut selections from across Shakespeare’s oeuvre, complete with plastic swords and borrowed kilts.
Practicing the scenes over the years has generated enough spectacle to alarm at least one senior administrator, who was reassured by a colleague: “Oh, no, that’s just Marcia’s class. Don’t even worry about it.”
But why tangle with 400-year-old theater scripts? “If you can make old-style English make sense,” Pentz says, “it gives you so much more insight into how to pace and parse and pause and do everything that you need to do to make any presentation effective.”
Next comes the motivational speech, and the mood in the room shifts entirely.
“It’s the hardest one, honestly, for me,” Pentz says. By this point in the semester, students have built enough trust in one another to speak about things that matter deeply to them. Topics have ranged from heart-wrenching loss to unexpected triumph. Some of the most remarkable moments Pentz has ever witnessed in a classroom have happened during this assignment.
On at least one occasion, a student finished, and somebody called for a group hug. The whole class obliged. Students routinely tell Pentz they wish the motivational speeches came earlier in the class, and she always hears the same counter from somewhere in the room: If they came at the start of the semester, they wouldn’t function in the same way. They’re right, and everyone knows it.
More Than Business, More Than Performance
What separates this course from a standard business communications class is Pentz’s conviction that great speaking is never just about content. It is about presence. She wants students to internalize a specific feeling: “I am not scared. I am not just playing a role. I am me in this moment, making this material, whatever that material may be, clear to my audience.”
Grading reflects this entirely. Pentz evaluates delivery: pacing, intentionality, eye contact, audience connection.
“I would rather have someone being over the top and ridiculous and pull me in,” she says, “than have them being absolutely fundamentally restrained to the point of timidity.” To this point, she brings stuffed animals into the classroom to help settle nervous students, records speeches so students can witness habits or tics they never knew they had, and routinely returns to a borrowed phrase from improv, driving speakers to push for the next level: “More awesome,” meaning try it again, only bigger.
The professional payoff, Pentz says, is concrete and transferable. “You can do it when you’re briefing your boss,” she says. “And you can do it when you are talking to the people you’re about to manage.”
What the Comedy Routine Actually Teaches
The final exam may sound like a gimmick, but it’s really anything but. “All comedy is delivery,” Pentz says. “Timing and cadence and pausing and all of the things we talk about.” Despite the seemingly impossible ask, she has never had a student fail to meet the assignment’s requirements.
One student arrived with a slideshow of his actor uncle’s increasingly bizarre hairstyles, each grown out for a different character role. An international student from Beijing, brought a guitar and offered deadpan observations about air pollution in their hometown of Beijing. A third dumped a pile of laundry on the floor and launched into a four-minute rant about parenting.
Once they hear a bit of laughter, students’ confidence feeds off it immediately, Pentz says. “Suddenly they get a little swagger.”
An international student recently finished his routine and said, visibly stunned, “I cannot believe I just did that. Comedy in a second language.” His classmate Cooper Rudolph (McIntire ’26) replied without missing a beat, “You are just a treasure. I am so happy you have been in this class.”
That moment, Pentz says, captures what the whole course is really about. “They are not competing with one another,” she says. “They are supporting one another.” After more than 20 years, it’s still the part of teaching Advanced Business Speaking that she loves most.
