Having a laugh – Timing in writing & comedy

I have been thinking a lot about timing. This is relevant to writing because timing in writing is important. And I’ve been thinking about it because I am writing a novel.

Timing, I have discovered, is different to rhythm. Or maybe it’s still rhythmic, just a different wave.

Rhythm at a micro-level – sentence, paragraph, even chapter – I am OK with. The rhythm of an entire piece is something I am learning, and working hard, to be sensitive to. As I’ve said before, I want my novel to work.

Timing, however, is different to the musical quality of words next to words, or the macro-scale peaks and troughs. Timing is about writing the right thing at the right time.

A writer with good timing will be snappier, sharper, funnier, the piece’s overall shape made more obvious. A writer with bad timing might still be good, but the rhythm will be affected.

While good timing is important throughout a piece, the thing I thought worth studying as an introduction to timing was humour. Jokes were, to me, the most logical place to begin, not only because I know how much comedians value timing but because I fear my novel being as unfunny as I am.

So I started thinking about humour, about what is funny. About what I find funny and why.

What I find funniest is when people are being funny and don’t show that they know it. I have friends I keep around solely because they say ridiculous things straight-faced, making me laugh like a mad man.
But apart from this type of humour being unusual, timing, in this instance, is less important than delivery, though it does play a part. Indeed, you won’t get me to keel over just by nonchalantly saying something batty.

What I find funny is not something you can regularly get from a funny show or movie. So I wondered, do I laugh at the TV? Does anybody laugh at the TV?

Which brings me to TV, our – being Australian – TV, and the Americanisation of humour.

Of humour in Kafka’s stories, David Foster Wallace wrote:

“It is this, I think, that makes Kafka’s wit inaccessible to children whom our culture has trained to see jokes as entertainment and entertainment as reassurance. It’s not that students don’t “get” Kafka’s humor but that we’ve taught them to see humor as something you get — the same way we’ve taught them that a self is something you just have. No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke — that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle.” [Read Laughing with Kafka]

The globalisation of humour is really the Americanisation of pop culture, pop culture being any form of entertainment easily accessible, not only in tone and depth but due to ubiquity. I’m going to prove how accessible American humour is as manifested in one of the bastions of US pop culture, the TV show – I did some research.

On TV between 6 and 12 tonight, there is 30 minutes when the stars align and there is no American show on any free-to-air channel, digital or otherwise. That five and a half hour ‘primetime’ block consists of the Colbert Report and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart – two shows with humorous pretences but with political analysis that is otherwise close to nonexistent on Australian TV. But the rest of that block includes two episodes of Two and a Half Men and an episode of The Big Bang Theory. Both of these shows, according to my research, are regularly among the top watched programs on TV for the week. (Yes, my research consisted of little more than browsing the TV Guide website, but still.)

Without venturing into a diatribe on how I think anybody who finds Two and a Half Men remotely funny is a half-wit, as that wouldn’t be helpful for anybody, I want to look briefly at the show’s comedic techniques – which brings me back to what David said in the quote above about “getting” the joke.

All jokes in Two and a Half Men are signposted with canned laughter (a beautiful term). Don’t know what’s funny? Is the humour too subtle? No worries, the laughter of the “audience” is there to help. And as it turns out, every second line is ‘funny’. This includes everything sarcastic, anything callous, aggressive, sexist or sexual. Things that under normal circumstance would not hold up to comedic scrutiny is, the viewer is made to believe, hilarious. Pretty much everything is funny.

Aside from the misogyny the show is built upon (Charlie goes through girls like a chain-smoker does cigarettes) and the fact I don’t like being told what to do, even if it is to just laugh, I want to say: “Mate (which I’ll inevitably add to assert my Australianness, fearful it’ll be ripped off me like a fraying band-aid), that’s not funny.”

But who am I to decide what is funny, it’s already been established that my humour is strange. What I do want to make a call on is the timing and the impact of poor timing.

I find The Simpsons funny. I may not find it to be 22 minutes of pure hilarity, but it makes me laugh. The Simpsons makes great use of irony. Homer says one thing, he does the opposite. The characters have an endearing balance of predictablity and unpredicatability and amid the buffoonery, slapstick and witty one-liners, jokes range from fart gags to postmodern self-references.

While The Simpsons is a part of the five and a half hours of pop culture (I’ve come to decide that pop culture is only American) available on my television tonight, while it still enjoys success and is still in production, the children of today don’t know a world without the show. They didn’t witness the rise, in fact they’re seeing the decline. The Simpsons, to them, is part of another era. Popular culture, by definition, is in constant change, dependent on trends and, simply, what is popular at any given time. The Simpsons is still popular, but if The Simpsons was a piece of clothing it would be an old favourite, comfy from wear and still with a place in the cupboard, but not what you’d be seen in on a Friday night.

In The Simpsons, a cartoon, the timing must be impeccable in more ways than one. But maybe being animated is an advantage here.

The timing in Two and a Half Men, however, is off – something which is both compensated for and emphasised by the laugh track. But these actors aren’t comedians and maybe standing it side by side with The Simpsons is unfair. Maybe trying to analyse a piece of ephemera, or any item of pop culture beyond it’s socio-historical context, to try to learn anything is unfair.

That a comedy should have poor timing is not cause for concern. That it is one of the most popular shows in the country and is a comedy show with poor timing that highlights its banal (and not ironically banal) jokes by using the comedic equivalent of the Caps Lock is a concern.

Back to David again. He wrote, “…that makes Kafka’s wit inaccessible to children whom our culture has trained to see jokes as entertainment.” When he wrote “our culture” he was referring to America’s. But it is now, more than ever, that America’s culture, that is, pop culture – everything popular and cool and of-the-moment, anything, it could be argued, entertaining – is also our culture. In an increasingly digital age, it’s inescapable. And anything it is training American children to do, it will also teach our children.

Don’t know what to laugh at? We’ll tell you. And we’ll tell you what is entertaining.

Related posts:

1. Laugh tracks
2. Trauma writing
3. Story. Telling.