Microtiming
The relationship between neural activity and timing in the telling of a joke
This is an excerpt from chapter five of the book
"Microtiming" refers to the smallest unit of time relevant to conveying a good joke. It is smaller than any one joke. And keep in mind, as emphasized many times, a "joke" in the context of this book is "anything that makes you laugh", not just a verbal set up and punchline. I'm just going to be using terms drawn from verbal jokes because they lend themselves easily to the explanations.
Also, we're talking about the deliberate act of trying to be funny. In any case where something non-deliberate made someone laugh, like seeing someone trip unexpectedly, circumstance did what the comedian aspires to do, which was allow for the audience to be able to make the right patterns at the right time.
Any comedian can tell you that one missed word, a beat or a pause at the wrong time, can make the difference between funny and not funny.
As we've explored, what makes a joke work is the creation of a pattern that activates a large amount of weak synaptic connections in a rapid amount of time. That might make it sound like the quicker the better.
However, you have to keep in mind that those connections have to be made across connections that are of distances that are feasible for the brain to make. Neurons have to be within reach of each other. Or, put within terms of our experience, we have to be in a frame of mind where we're prepared to think about it in the way the comedian wants us to think about it.
Too much input into the mind of the audience, too quickly, will defeat that by trying to construct patterns to represent information faster than the human mind can build it. Pretty simple really. Go too fast and the brain of the audience can't keep up with you.
Timing that is too slow is a matter of not inspiring enough synaptic activity to stand out above the usual noise that is always happening. Present an idea at a pace that the audience can assimilate each component into the overall pre-existing pattern of their own continual thinking, and you won't succeed in getting a laugh response.
The situation is surprisingly fragile, too. The pace the brain operates at, both in how many new synaptic connections becoming available for testing every moment, and the pace at which the active pattern is moving and changing, is on the level of milliseconds. A comedian taking so long to set up a joke can easily be understood to the degree where the audience understands the premise too well before the punchline hits, leaving the audience feeling like they could see the punchline coming a mile a way. Even a mere mis-stepped word, a pause, a fraction of a second, can cause weak connections to either be activated or not in such a way as to undermine the joke.
I've been talking about the activity in the brain as a chart, where you count the cumulative number of neuron connections to determine if a joke or idea has taken the mind into "the funny zone". But we should remember those neuron connections aren't simply a stack of unrelated occurrences. They exist in a network, and they are all connected, and part of a continuing and evolving pattern. One small change upstream can lead to entirely different patterns downstream.
That means if a small group of synaptic connections, maybe even just one of them, either is not activated in the desired pattern, or is not activated at all, then the whole of the resulting pattern will be affected. The resulting pattern, different from what the comedian intended, may not be what it needs to be in order to inspire the critical amount weak connections.
Just as important to consider is that the resulting pattern from a mis-step in the telling of the joke may inspire enough activity to make the audience laugh, but at something other than what the joke was supposed to be about. This happens all the time when comedians are testing out new material, and in our daily lives. You can be telling something that you mean to be funny for one reason, but in the telling, you say something different from what you intended, and people laugh.
I've seen many a comedian abandon a joke right in the middle because they felt that they had mis-stepped along the way, and the joke was DOA. The audience often says "No, tell us, we want to hear where what you were going to say", and if the comedian relents and finishes the joke, a lot of the time the audience does get it, but they don't usually laugh. At least, they don't laugh as much as they would have if the joke had been told with the right timing.
The misstep the comedian made in the delivery affected the entirety of the joke. When you get a joke, or don't get it, all the processes that happen to make that determination can happen in something less than a second. It can take longer too, like when you get one of those jokes that make you stop and think, and slowly it dawns on you, as the flow of patterns is just barely within the right time frame to establish itself enough for the right amount of activity to be inspired.
Microtiming is the level at which we are exposed to the delicacy of the process of conveying a joke. If the punchline comes at the wrong time, the audiences patterns may have already moved on. They may be processing the patterns that result in them seeing the conclusion before the punchline comes. They may have missed the point altogether, in which case their mind is moving on to their own opinions. They are branching off, and they have deviated from a point where a comedian can inspire the critical chain reaction of connecting neurons.
Anybody who does comedy, though, already knows the results in practise. Really, the more interesting insights come as we start to look at broader contexts of time.
Comments
Add a comment
No comments yet