Einstein is famous for figuring out how to space into time–but the joke was on him, because joke writers already knew how.
Scott McCloud (Understanding Comics) details a million tricks comic artists use to translate a series of still photos into a story with action, suspense, and pacing. And, for those of us with our minds in the gutter, in McCloud’s world that’s just the space between 2 panels, and just the place your mind does its best work.
Stand-up comics live or die by their timing. One of the space-time tricks of written humor is making the reader wait for a riddle’s answer. That’s because the wait, the pause, the time the reader spends trying to guess how it turns out, is as important to making the riddle funny as the quality of the joke itself.
But you know that trick–you’ve seen it a million times. And to figure it out, you don’t have to be Einstein….
3 responses so far ↓
1 jr // Aug 4, 2003 at 5:45 pm
So was there times when Einstein wasn’t Einstein…
Waiting for the punchline.
2 Betsy Devine // Aug 5, 2003 at 12:21 pm
Eee-hah. Yes, there is danger in trying to post to a blog at Kinkos while next door in Borders the clan is waiting to go to lunch, and thoughts about how hungry they must be keep flying across your mind….So, nakedly put, my thought is that written humor uses word order almost obsessively, and riddles go a step beyond by hiding the answer on a back page or writing it upside down, and these tricks within the space of a printed page mimic the way spoken humorists use time.
3 Betsy Devine // Aug 5, 2003 at 12:22 pm
A physicist, a mathematician, and an engineer walk into a bar.
The bartender says, “Is this some kind of joke?”