People who make their living by making people laugh have a much more nuanced appreciation of comic timing - as an art, rather than a science. “What we discovered is that it’s complete nonsense.” The data showed that timing changes are simply not a factor in the delivery of jokes, either in speeding up or slowing down or pausing before a punch line.Īttardo said that when he shared his findings with professional comedians, they were not in the least bit surprised. “When we started out, we thought that this folk theory of timing was correct,” Attardo said. Attardo set out to quantify that comedic pause with an experiment in which he asked college students to tell two jokes, one of their choosing and and one given to them - a not-especially-funny story about an engineer and a talking frog. Attardo, the former editor of HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research, said that he found the same claim was made everywhere, from comedy manuals to scholarly research papers: Timing is essential to comedy, and comedians emphasize punch lines with a pause. One of the few studies on comic timing was published in 2011 by Salvatore Attardo, a linguist at Texas A&M University. Is there a similar phenomenon at work in comedy? According to psychologists who study humor, time may seem to stop for a second because our brain is catching up with a clever punch line. Consider, for instance, how people who have been in a car accident report that time seemed to stand still. And, for comedians, the timing after the punch line is what really counts.Īs psychologist Dean Buonomano points out in his new book about time and the human brain, our mind not only tracks the passage of time, but it can stretch or compress our sense of that passage in various ways. It may be that our sense of the importance of comic timing comes more from how we perceive jokes than from how they’re delivered. Social science and psychological research on comic timing is limited, but what exists suggests that the layperson’s understanding of how the rhythm of joke delivery works is totally mistaken. But this conventional wisdom about comic timing might be all wrong, and not just because the joke about the suit isn’t funny. (The real humor in this scene is that comedian Sacha Baron Cohen is playing the role of the buffoonish Borat to toy with the humor coach, who doesn’t realize the joke is on him.) It nevertheless perfectly illustrates one of the most widely accepted notions about timing in comedy: pausing before the punch line. This is obviously barely a joke, if it even deserves that name. “This suit is black … that’s a pause … not!” the coach demonstrated, stressing the importance of having a space between the setup and the punch line. Kazakhstani reporter Borat Sagdiyev learned as much during his travels through America for his classic 2006 documentary, Borat! He visited a humor coach, who tried to impart a basic principle of comedic timing using a “not joke” about the color of Borat’s suit. This week, Science of Us is exploring time: what makes it feel like it’s speeding up or slowing down, how we learn to tell the difference, and how we can learn to control it either way.Ĭonventional wisdom dictates that timing is the secret to comedy.
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