Theory

W​hat 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. H​ow does this work in practice? L​et’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.” 

“T​wo 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!’” 

T​his 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.” 

I​n 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. 

I​f 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. A​nd 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. S​o run free now my nascent joke tellers and future rule breakers. You’ve now learned the basic rule of timing.

T​here must be a trillion ways to tell a joke. Today, lucky for you, I’m going to explain how to tell the fundamental ones. The trillion others will have to wait for another post.

B​efore we get into “how” to deliver any basic joke, we need to define some terms.

• R​hythm/Pace: The speed with which you talk.

• Timing: The amount of time you give the audience to understand the set up of your joke before delivering the punch line. (Check my previous post on timing for a three minute explanation.)

• B​eat: The approximate time of a heartbeat.

• P​itch: The tone/note, either high or low, of your voice.

• O​perative word: The word you put the stress/emphasis on.

N​ow that we’re philosophically sound, lets break down how a joke works at its fundamental level. In fact we’re going to do it in gibberish, so we don’t get tripped up in the meaning of words.

(Spoken at a chill conversational pace) B​uh dum, buh dum, buh dum, buh dum, buh *dum* (beat) (and now spoken faster with a higher pitch) BuhDAHdum.

T​ADA! Jokes.

S​o what happened in all that?

T​o begin, the pace is even keeled and conversational. This sets our baseline with which we can deviate from when it comes to our punchline.

• H​ow does this work in practice?

B​reathe. Slow all the way down and speak as if you were telling someone about your flight itinerary to your next conference.

• W​hat are those stars over the last “dum”?

T​hat’s your “operative word”. What word you emphasize can change the meaning of a sentence in a blink. I present you the greatest operative word sentence ever constructed.

“I never put a squirrel up my ass”

Sit with that for a moment and examine how each emphasis changes the meaning. My favorite is “put”. There is so much unspoken possibility in that choice.

Let’s give an example with a simple joke. “I want to die like my grandfather. Peaceful and in my sleep. Unlike the screaming people in his car.” The operative word here is “sleep”. The last word in the set up, just before the punchline. Which, in well written jokes is where it tends to fall. This reading comes to most of us intuitively, but it must be highlighted, because messing with expectations is something we’re going to come to a while later in this long string of essays. In the meantime, notice that if someone placed the emphasis on “MY” we’d be wondering why to reemphasize that point. Is the joke now about your feeling of pride that *your* grandfather died while driving other people?

• W​hat’s the “(beat)”?

T​he “beat” I previously explained, b​ut for todays purposes, it’s just giving the audience some time to “get” the set up and add a little suspense. So, just before the punchline, give a heartbeats worth of time before delivering the punchline.

A​nd now, the Holy Grail. The Punchline. We change pace to faster and change pitch to higher. If you doubt me, watch a sitcom.

Voila. Now you know how to tell a joke.

Hitler was a vegetarian and a painter. I could just leave it here. I’m very tempted to.

But think of every movie villain that loves classical music and fine clothes. This never strikes us as odd. We intuitively know this can be the case. But there is a small subset of people, of whom I was once one, who truly do believe that art enhances us not simply in our ability to wring more pleasure out of life, but that it also enhances us morally.

There is an old line I first heard in conservatory during a talk back that I then repeated for over a decade. It’s that the Theater allows us to empathize better with others and better enables us to walk a mile in their shoes. I would then add, years later, that if we had simply seen Othello’s story in the headlines it would just read “Black man kills White wife.” But having watched Othello we could see beyond this simplistic default moral state. Being artists, and appreciators of the arts, gave us a hand, a boost, a leg up, at viewing the world in a more moral light.

The first point, about viewing Othello in a more empathetic understanding way, holds true. My mistake, and the mistake of many boosters of the arts as a tool towards moral improvement, is to think that this transfers to the rest of the world.

It does not.

Understanding the aesthetics of a Rothko, the lilt of Debussy, or the prose of Austen does not aid us in the expansion of our circle of moral concern. I regret to inform you, it’s simply not that easy. And it is that ease, by the way, that makes the idea popular. “All I have to do is like this thing I already like, and I’m also a better person?! Sign me up!” Imagine how popular I’d be if I made a convincing argument for the moral benefits of eating ice cream.

But does the theater not make us more empathetic to Othello? As I said, yes it does. But to him only. You could hear of a man who murdered his wife as soon as you leave the theater. You may think to yourself “There could be more to this story.” But your assumption is going to lean toward “murdering your wife is bad, odds are this guy is not a good guy.” And you wouldn’t be wrong. Those are indeed the odds.

Empathy is also a terrible tool for moral improvement. This may sound counterintuitive so allow this little thought experiment. You see a small child, starving and impoverished. You are told that less than a dollar a day could save their life. Easy decision. Now this child has a sister. Ok. Two bucks. No problem. Now they have ten siblings. Ok, 10 bucks still ain’t a lot, but you’re not going to do it. And it has nothing to do with the money. The money was never the issue. It was always about what tugged at your sense of empathy most. You actually care less about 10 kids than 1, where if empathy were the tool we thought it were we’d presumably care 10 times more! The fact that we don’t should give us pause as to how important being “more empathetic” should be. Like energy, like money, like hours in a day, empathy is a finite thing. It diminishes with use, it does not increase.

Perhaps empathy, like a muscle, can be increased so as to take on more? I certainly believe this is true. But also like a muscle, it will still have its limits no matter how much training you give it.

This brings us back to the original claim that the theater makes us more moral because it makes us more empathetic. Unless everyone gets 3 hours for a genius like Shakespeare to write our story for us to maximize the empathy of all viewers, I’m afraid it simply doesn’t translate to the real world.

Only systematic thinking about morality, in the abstract, with our frontal lobes, as opposed to emotional limbic system thinking, is what makes us more moral people in the only way it matters: our actions.

So by all means enjoy that play, that painting, that ballet. It is enough to simply do that. And when you leave that space and go out into the world, be kind. They are two separate things after all.

In my last post, What Is Art?, I stated the definition of Art as the conscious creation of beauty for its own sake, but how do we use that?

“A conscious creation” doesn’t really lend itself to things we can do with the theory other than not mistaking inanimate things for Art or confusing John Cage’s 4'33" or Duchamps Urinal as Art, rather than commentary in the guise of Art. Or as Rodger Scruton called it, “the Painted Word.” But once we’ve done that, we’re still left with “How do *I* use this definition to make better Art?”

“Beauty”. This is much more helpful than it seems at first glance. Due to all the fuzziness around the definition, intended or not, many are driven astray when looking for ways to improve their Art by trying to adhere to principles we were taught or gleaned from others. In my case, in the Theater, we were given principles like “find the truth in the moment”, or “ground yourself in honesty”, or “reconnect with your scene partner.” These are lovely ideas, that no doubt have importance and merit in the creation of living breathing three dimensional characters, but how do they practically help make what I’m doing better? How do I know when I’ve achieved it using any metric outside of gazing at my own navel? What if what I’m doing honestly is still bad Art? How do I *actually* improve it?

The concept that Art is the creation of Beauty (or aesthetic pleasure for those more analytically minded) is what will get us back in line with what all artists are in fact trying to do. So when we’re at a loss, the first place we should look to is the tool kits of our respective Artistic formats. In the case of actors (my cohort) our tool kit is wrapped up in our bodies and the choices we make with our lines. “How do I make this more beautiful to watch” translates to: Are you paying attention to your body or are you just existing physically as yourself? Unless you’re playing yourself, there is work there that can be done. Can the way you stand tell us more about your character without the need for words? Can you use more economy of motion in your gestures so that each movement has more significance than it would if you were just existing normally? Can you craft a richer tone of voice? Can you find a more novel, yet still believable, reading of a line? This focus lifts our heads up from our navels and back to our training, be it acting, writing, painting, singing, etc.

“For it’s own sake” lends us a hand here as well. Aim first and foremost to the work being beautiful on its own merits. Not whether it advances an agenda, an ideology, or speaks some sort of truth to power. These are all important things in their own right, but when aiming to improve your art, look to first principles before you attempt to refine or insert a topical message. For one, if the art is truly extraordinary then your message, should there be one, will be lifted by the beauty of the art itself. Second, the more you focus on a message the more you risk making the art itself secondary, cheap, and that most dreaded of all things; propaganda.

What can’t this theory do for us?

Tell us “why”. That isn’t a definitions place. What you do and why you do it is up to you. That’s where the Art exists after all. Any definition that attempts to tell you otherwise is selling something, even if it’s simply the agrandizement of the person doing the selling. There will be no lack of people telling you what they think the purpose of Art is; the Why of Art. What that beauty is here to do. You can take and leave those as you choose. But if someone tells you that the purpose of a racecar is to taste good, you’ll know they’ve missed something. So too, with Art. There are infinities of the possible within this definition, but never forget the operative word is “within”. Don’t confuse what you’re engaging in before you’ve even begun. After that, the rest is up to you.

This question has plagued mankind for centuries now. But there is an answer to this question. It is this:

Art is the conscious creation of beauty for its own sake.

How does “beauty” make sense here? It’s simply to signify that the act of conscious creation of Art is in the realm of aesthetics. Nothing more, nothing less. And it should not be confused with barbie dolls, or super models. Aesthetic pleasure can be found in the darkness as well as the bright pinks of the world. The painting A Portrait of Dorian Grey is hideous, still art. A Rammstien concert is not where you’d go wearing glitter, still art. A slasher flick is full of blood and gore, still art. They are all aesthetic creations consciously created purely for their own sake.

Why “conscious”? Because the act of aesthetic creation is something that can only be done with a conscious mind. A computer program is not the creator of art, it’s programers are. It is no more the artist than the paintbrush is a painter. As we get ever more and more powerful unconcious AI’s this point will become more and more salient.

Why “for it’s own sake”? Purposelessness is inherent in all art. No basic human needs are met by art. Which is what distinguishes it from decoration of a useful item or propaganda. It’s just a thing we do that generates nothing but aesthetic pleasure, for no other purpose but that aesthetic pleasure.

What isn’t Art?

Chairs, beds, tables, a leather jacket, a spoon, a computer. In these cases the primary function of the object is to fill a necessity. Decoration is common because beauty makes everything better. These are often referenced to as “almost a work of art” for a reason. It a high compliment to the tradesman to get you to almost forget the thing you’re looking at actually has a purpose. To remove craftspeople from the category of artist isn’t to diminish them. Is it to give back the proper weight on their creation of useful things. And to not allow an over expansive definition of art to lay claim to everything under the sun. Also, nature is not art. It is nature. It was not crafted for our pleasure, no matter what your religion says. It is a thing made by unconscious forces that we evolved in. Thus naturally we’ve come to find it beautiful. But it is to diminish nature by comparing it to the pretty and pointless baubles made by humans. Finally Lionel Messi is not an artist as what he’s doing fits none of these categories in our definition. Is soccer “The Beautiful Game?” Yes. But the point of it isn’t the creation of aesthetic pleasure. The point is to win the game. Thus, not art.

Is shitty art still art?

Yes. The quality of an art work is not a barrier to qualifying for the category and no such stipulation is included in the definition. Millions of four year olds with crayons are making art every day.

Why is this question so fraught then?

Humans, especially artists, don’t like to be told that not everything they do is art. They want to lay claim to the word in every action in their day to day lives. It’s simple greed that informs this. We value art highly so everyone wants a piece of that pie, definitions be damned. It’s also a form of selfishness enshried in Andy Warhol’s empty definition that “Art is whatever you can get away with”. Artists understand definitions outside of their field. Being told that “cancer is whatever you can get away with calling cancer” would strike them as absurd. They simply refuse to be consistent. This is aided by art’s inherent uselessness. Unlike cancer, art can seem to lack stakes. This leads to: “What does it matter how we define it?” The natural answer is that if we’re going to give a word a definition, that definition needs to work. A definition has no meaning if it can be used to define anything, and exludes nothing. That is by definition, not a definition. To give something a definition is to set limits around it, to distinguish it from other human endeavors so that we may better understand it. But human beings are incentivized to want the glory we place upon the act for themselves. Add to that the fact that there is no governing body over definitions, and you can easily see why it’s been made confusing, when in fact it’s really rather simple. But some people don’t get what they want out of any coherent definition, so they reject it.

Who are you to say what Art is anyway?

I’m a human being. That’s the price of entry to this discussion. After that it’s simply down to who has the most coherent definition. I happen to be an artist (actor) and a philosopher, so this is a natural fit for me. But anyone can play the game. Relatedly, this style of questioning can be flipped around: Who are you to tell me I can’t offer a definition? Once that move is rendered moot, we’re back to judging every applicant based upon the cogency of their answer to this question.

And that’s it. That’s the painfully simple truth about art. Now go thank a craftsperson. They do things that are useful.