What is timing? Timing, in its most basic conception, is giving your audience enough time to grasp the set up, without giving them enough time to guess the punch line. How does this work in practice? Let’s examine three simple jokes and pay attention to where the word “(Beat)” appears:
“I want to die like my grandfather. Peaceful and in my sleep. (Beat) Unlike the people screaming in his car.”
“Two muffins are in an oven. One turns to the other and says ‘Is it hot in here or is it just me?’ And the other muffin says (Beat) ‘OH MY GOD A TALKING MUFFIN!’”
This last one involves some audience participation and telling the joke like a pirate. “What’s a Pirates favorite letter? (Someone invariably says R) Aye, you may think tis R, (Beat) but it’s the C that he loves.”
In each of these examples the “(Beat)” appears at the end of the set up, before the punchline. A “beat” is a unit of time and it denotes the length of a heartbeat. Thus, we see that at the most fundamental level, we should give our audience about a heartbeats worth of time to grasp our set up, before delivering the punchline.
If you go back and look over those punchlines you may find that it would have been difficult to guess where the joke was going unless you’d heard it before. And you’d be right. The last take away with timing is that you’re going to spend most of your focus on not leaving your audience in the dust. Because you already know the end of the joke, it can be tempting to “get to the funny part”. But, giving your audience time to take in the set up and using that heartbeat of time before the punchline to build a little suspense, is more enjoyable for them. After all, you’re telling the joke to make them laugh. And that’s it. That’s timing in its most basic form.
Could you time things differently and still tell a funny joke? Absolutely. There are infinite ways to tell a joke well. But, this is the root error people make when they say you can’t teach timing: they despair in attempting to explain all possibilities instead of clearly and concisely explaining the basic rule. The joke “You guys ever steal an old person?” doesn’t need a beat after the word “steal” to be delivered well. But if you added one you wouldn’t be telling it poorly either. As they say, you can’t break the rules until you learn them. So run free now my nascent joke tellers and future rule breakers. You’ve now learned the basic rule of timing.