Why Are Comedians Quick?

Why do comedians seem to be so much quicker in their thinking than us normal people? How is it that they think so quickly? How is it that they respond quickly? Do they really think faster than we do? Is it a requirement?

Improv

The most extreme example of seemingly superhuman speed is found in improvisation, as anyone who saw Whose Line Is It, Anyway? can attest to. The first and foremost requirement of improv is this: No matter what happens, you must accept a premise you’re given, rather than knock it down. So if you’re on the improv stage, and your fellow actor says, “Look at that camel!” you don’t say as a response, “That’s a giraffe,” simply because you were had a good giraffe joke. That would knock down the premise you were offered and destroy the bit. You could say, “But why is it blue?” And by doing this, you accept the premise, go with it, and offer something to your fellow actor.

The people in the audience are not used to accepting new ideas without taking time to process and, perhaps, to refuse them. So when they see a new idea accepted so quickly and built upon, it automatically seems as if a lot of thought has gone into the response.

But that isn’t the case.

Accepting a new idea takes a lot of time for us. Accepting a new idea, to comedians, takes no time at all. If they don’t, they die.

The Live Interview

Let’s move on from improvisation to interview shows, from Late Night to The Daily Show or The Colbert Report, where comedians interview live people, forcing them to improvise jokes on their spot. Here’s one example:

In The Daily Show’s March 12^th, 2007 interview, comedian Jon Stewart interviews Senator Chris Dodd. He asks him why he is running for president.

Sen. Dodd: “First of all, I’m a first-time father. I’ve got a couple of young children, daughters, and I don’t want to sound naïve at all, and I look at them... I mean, you’ve got a couple of young kids. What kind of a future are they going to have? What kind of a world are they going to grow up in? What kind of a nation are they going to live in the 21^st century? And, frankly, right now, I think there is more at stake than probably ever before in my lifetime. Both with what’s going on at home and abroad. And I decided to get in this race and talk about what we could do to make it better for them. I know it’s naïve, but—”

Jon Stewart interrupts him, “Here’s what I’ve done. I also have young kids and I look at them, and I started building a bunker.”

Stewart automatically accepts Senator Dodd’s premise (thinking about the future while looking at your kids) and goes on from there. In fact, he continues, “Your idea could work, too. But I have a feeling, when the day comes, I’m not going to be knocking on your door, you’re going to be knocking on mine.”

As Stewart proves by taking Sen. Dodd’s premise and reaching the opposite conclusion, accepting a premise doesn’t actually make the other guy right. It just means you’re agile enough of thought to understand someone else’s premise. Then you go with that logic, and see where it leads you.

Smart People vs. Comedians

Adapting to changing circumstances, being able to accept new ideas, not sticking rigidly to your old position – these are all the necessary tools of a good comedian. They are also the marks of intelligence. So what happens when a quick and intelligent comedian meets a quicker and more intelligent man? The man may not be as funny, but he’s able to adapt to new situations just as fast as the comedian. Here is the best example I found in which the shoe was on the other foot.

This is from an interview in The Colbert Report (Feb. 8^th, 2006) in which Stephen Colbert, who, on a daily basis, stumps his guests by offering ideas (meaning ‘premises’) they’ve never thought of or didn’t expect to face, now interviews Prof. Alan Dershowitz. We’re going to look at the dialogue like a chess match.

Colbert introduces Dershowitz, then runs to the crowd, as he always does, and gets cheers. Colbert sits down.

Colbert: “Mr. Dershowitz, thank you for joining us.”

Dershowitz: “Thank you.”

Colbert: “Do you have an audience at work?”

Colbert’s opening salvo is framing a question Dershowitz clearly doesn’t expect. Dershowitz answers immediately: “I do, always. I teach to a class.”

Colbert: “You do? Really?” Colbert didn’t expect a ‘yes’ from his guest, but adapts quickly, “Do they applaud like this when you come in? Up in Harvard?” Colbert takes his question to a place Dershowitz would not have expected.

Dershowitz begins his answer even before Colbert finishes asking the question: “No, they react.” Dershowitz isn’t blocking by saying ‘no’, he’s splitting hairs, thus proving he’s accepted Colbert’s premise and is building on it.

“Oh, really?”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“With fear, I’m assuming.” Colbert accepts Dershowitz’s premise and takes it one step further to a place Dershowitz clearly did not mean.

“I hope,” Dershowitz thus accepts Colbert’s premise again.

“Do you ever shroud a student like in that movie, The Paper Chase?” Again, Colbert offers a premise his guest was not expecting.

“No, they’re too smart.” Dershowitz does not deny the premise. He accepts it and within the rules of the premise finds a reason why it isn’t so. He continues, “They sit there with their, you know, Googles, and they know more than I do.”

Colbert: “Yeah, with their internets.” Colbert accepts Dershowitz’s ‘Googles’ and builds on it. Mockingly, of course. “And their world wide webbing? It’s amazing.”

“It is,” Dershowitz accepts Colbert’s volley.

They move on to talk about Dershowitz’s book. Colbert puts it up on the table: “Okay, this is it. Preemption, a Knife That Cuts Both Ways. Tell me about the knife and why it’s cutting us.” Colbert presumes a false premise regarding the book.

Dershowitz opens his mouth to answer, and Colbert continues, “Is it cutting us?”

“It is cutting us.” Premise accepted.

“Whose knife is it?”

Not blinking, Dershowitz continues, accepting Colbert’s premise, and using it to make his point, “It is the knife of power that is being wielded. Preemption means, just simply, we get the bad guys before they get us. And that, sometimes, can be a good thing.”

“You look at us wrong, you get a God-smack.” Colbert immediately picks up on Dershowitz’s premise and goes with it one step further.

“No,” Dershowitz splits hairs again rather than blocking completely: “you try to kill us, you try to invade us, you try and terrorize us, and we’re going to get you first, but there are tremendous risks involved in doing that. Because we can get the wrong people, we can get there too early, we can provoke an attack, so it’s a knife that cuts both ways.”

“Well, this sort of sounds like anti-preemption here,” Colbert accepts what Dershowitz says and tries to take it to a direction Dershowitz doesn’t want to take.

“Well, it’s pro some preemption and anti some preemption,” Dershowitz clears his theme by understanding what Colbert said and explaining the difference between the two positions. “It all depends.”

“You can’t have it both ways!” Colbert aggressively introduces a new and unexpected premise (elsewhere known as The O’Reilly Premise).

“You can have it both ways. You have to have it both ways.” Dershowitz understands the other side but insists on his own.

“No, if you have to have it both ways, that’s why the knife cuts back and forth,” Colbert introduces a new premise in mid-argument, miming a knife cutting both him and Dershowitz.

“Absolutely,” Dershowitz accepts it.

“You want the knife to just do this,” he mimes the knife attacking only Dershowitz.

“But it has to be sterilized,” Dershowitz goes with Colbert’s premise even further. “You don’t want to cause an infection.”

Colbert moves on to his next thought: “Okay, so...” and then Dershowitz’s words sink in, and he stops, stumped for an answer. He was not able to adapt quickly enough.

The audience begins to laugh, as Colbert thinks of the next thing to say.

“I’m Jewish,” says Dershowitz during Colbert’s silence, accepting his own premise and going with it.

Colbert takes another few seconds, then, unable to think of something smarter, changes the subject.

And thus Dershowitz wins this battle against an intelligent, professional and mighty-quick comedian not because he’s funnier but because he’s that much smarter.

Accepting new ideas is a mark of intelligence. Understanding new ideas is also a mark of intelligence. Being able to adapt quickly is one, too. And always keep in mind that understanding the other side’s logic doesn’t make the other side is right. It just means you’re smart.

The Comedy-Off: Colbert

The Comedy-Off

After posting the last entry about humorous writing and timing, one Nir Yaniv asked me why I didn’t use excerpts from more popular sources, like Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat. I said that I wanted to quote from things that the readers are less likely to have read, something that will feel new. But, I added, why don’t you do it on your blog? As the conversation continued, we decided to have a comedy-off. Here’s his first salvo.

So far there are only three rules:

1. Entries must be in English, so that both our readers can enjoy them.

2. There must be at least 4-5 excerpts. Anything less is cheating.

3. The loser’s name starts with ‘N’.

More rules may crop up as the game continues.

Timing

What Jerome K. Jerome did in the excerpts Nir brought is build a comic situation, which certainly requires great timing. The point in the last entry in Storytellers, though, was about a different sort of timing.

We’re going to get to it in a roundabout way.

Laughter, like humor, is a sure-fire way to weed the more intelligent from the less intelligent. This is how laughter does it: Laughter almost always starts off with a powerful ‘ha’, in which our diaphragm (read: stomach) hits the bottom of our lungs. Laughter clearly marks the milli-second you got the joke. There is never a doubt about who laughed first, who laughed second, and who laughed last if at all. Laughter shows us how fast someone understood something.

In the Jack Vance and Dorothy Parker excerpts I’ve quoted in the last post, everyone who does laugh (not everyone will laugh) laughs at the same time at the same word. To do that, the author needs to set up one set of expectations in a very clear way and then offset it in a surgically-precise manner to produce the same result in everyone’s brain with one word. Try reading those excerpts again, and see how you’re always surprised at the same spot and want to laugh at the same spot. Check out if you can see how we were set up one way then taken another.

In the Jerome K. Jerome excerpts, meanwhile, it’s the situation that’s comical. The comic situation builds and builds and becomes more and more absurd, and therefore more and more funny. People who listen to or read it will start laughing at different spots and their laughter will keep on rolling as the situation grows more comical.

“We’re at war, sir. How can you ask us to make sacrifices?”

Speaking of having one set of expectations, then being taken another way, there’s a subset of that category, in which the writer already knows what we think, so he doesn’t bother building up the premise, he just knocks it down. That is one neat trick, and one man and his writers do it time and time again on television.

Stephen Colbert

Colbert, in his program, The Colbert Report, makes it a point to again and again appear to say one thing but actually say another. He never tells you he doesn’t believe what he’s saying. He never tells you that what he’s saying is absurd. He is relying on the audience’s set of presumptions to already realize that he couldn’t possibly mean what he’s saying.

Here are a few examples:

“Folks, everywhere you look these days, there are signs our great American traditions are disappearing. Look at this,” he shows a newspaper headline, “ ‘The great American swing set is teetering’. The wear-a-helmet-first Gestapo would have you believing that playgrounds are dangerous. And they are. That’s exactly why we need them. To thin the herd.”

As before, explaining why something funny works really takes the punch of it. See if you can tell how he assumes you’re thinking one thing and preys upon it.

Here he continues his rant:

“Sadly enough, even the weather page is in a state of moral decay.” Colbert pulls out a colorful weather map from USA Today, filled with red zones, orange zones and red zones. “What’s wrong with red, white, and blue, USA Today? This rainbow weather map is just another example of the homo-meteorological agenda. Folks, I don’t care what their forecast is, I will not turn partly gay with a chance of a reach-around.”

Another time, he took on the policy of ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’, by suggesting the Pentagon adopt an even stricter policy: “ ‘Don’t know, don’t think’. Under the new policy, it will be against regulations for a soldier to know what homosexuality is. If a fellow soldier tells you he’s gay, it’s your duty to assume he’s filled with joy. If you see two naked guys oiled up and rolling around, just assume they’re wrestling. And if someone starts soaping you up in the shower, say thank you and salute. Because the only way we can have a cohesive fighting force is if there is never a question about a comrade’s sexual orientation. And we can no longer count on gay soldiers refusing to answer the question we’re too afraid to ask.”

Colbert on competition:

“Competition improves everything. After Home Depot opened down the block, service at my local hardware store got a lot better!” He pauses a second, then feels a need to add, “Until it closed.”

Colbert takes on education:

“Oprah Winfrey recently spent over 40 million dollars to start a school in South Africa. She said Third World kids were more desperate to learn than our kids. Yes, Oprah, that’s exactly why we have to hold the Third World kids back!”

Later on, he adds:

“And, hey, don’t the liberals always say, ‘who are we to judge these people’? Maybe dysentery and guinea worms are part of their culture? I don’t know.”

Here Colbert takes a stand on capital punishment:

“Most disappointingly, my own Catholic Church is against capital punishment. Well, that’s pretty hypocritical considering they wouldn’t even have a religion if it weren’t for capital punishment.”

The danger, of course, in phrasing things like this is that some people will take you at your word. President Bush's people, for example, who invited Colbert to the Press Corps Dinner. Then again, maybe they were fooled by the red, white, and blue colors that pervade the show.

In a recent ‘meet the author’ that can be found somewhere in podcast-land, Colbert says that some of the people he grew up with tell him, Now we agree with what you’re saying.

On the other hand, of course, if you add ‘... Not’ at the end of every sentence, you won’t be as funny.

Over to you, Nir.