I read today someone’s opinion that a good joke can be told in twenty seconds or less, otherwise it is a story - and more often than not, not a great one. Few people are professional comedians.
Would you generally agree with this observation? Would you change the amount of time?
I think the line between joke and funny story is pretty arbitrary, and really matters more to professional entertainers than it does to ordinary humans.
I remember in Tina Fey’s book she talked about the tension between the SNL writers, who would proudly write an entire sketch just to build up to a single punchline, and the performers, who would break into a sweat if they didn’t get a laugh virtually the instant they walked onstage.
Sure. Let’s limit this to you or me or a buddy telling a joke. Does time affect quality?
TV Tropes talks about The Triple, where the joke sets up with two related things, and the punchline is a third. Just getting through the setup can take a bit, but speaking 20 seconds at a conversational rate is about 40-50 words, which should be enough to have the priest, minister, and rabbi all say something to the bartender.
I remember a short story that took several minutes to read. The last sentence was a punchline which revealed that the entire story was a setup for that joke. Seemed kind of funny to me at the time. I found a webpage with the story just now and its audio narration clocks in over one hour.
You can read it at the link below. I spoilered it because I can’t remember if it’s safe for work or not. I’m not re-reading it.
I posted a joke on reddit that is one of my top posts of all time. I just read it over and it took me 50 seconds. And I can read way faster than I can talk.
It’s safe. And I’m not even mad at you anymore.
Context, context, context.
Do people really stand around telling each other jokes? When I think of laughing, it’s usually because someone in a group made a funny remark or a comeback just at the right moment. Those are always short, usually the shorter the better, but not actually jokes.
Steven Wright and Mitch Hedberg and Dmitri Martin made careers out of well-crafted jokes, following old-schoolers like Henny Youngman and Rodney Dangerfield, but they’re rare even for professional comedians. Yet if a comedian makes you laugh a dozen times inside one topic, you’re calling that a story instead of a series of jokes. I’m not sure.
Down deep, I think the line being drawn here is silly. Humor isn’t a continuum, it’s an ocean with a constantly changing topography.
That sounds like a feghoot, although they’re generally much less than an hour (though longer than 20 seconds).
Behold! The three-and-a-half minute joke:
Now, done well as it is here this joke is funny throughout. But it is a joke with a setup and punchline. And the punchline depends on the setup being long. So I contend a joke can last longer than 20 seconds.
Thank you for IDing this type of “humor”. I loathe these, especially when a noun is made up to make the joke work, One in particular had the ending “Silly Rabbi, kicks are for trids”. WTF is a trid? Nothing, a stupid word made up to allow the word inversion. Ugh!
One of my favorites. The ol’ “shaggy dog story” (or a variant thereof, as this has an actual joke punchline, just long and drawn out). Norm is excellent at executing them, with “The Moth” being perhaps my favorite of the genre.