 Comedy: August 16, 2023 Issue [#12125] |
This week: Brevity Edited by: Robert Waltz  
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Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit,
And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes,
I will be brief: your noble son is mad...
—William Shakespeare (Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2)
Brevity is a great charm of eloquence.
—Marcus Tullius Cicero
Through an arbitrary problem, I had arrived at a tenet of good writing: brevity wins.
—Michael Winter |
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Brevity may be the soul of wit, but I have a minimum word count to meet.
Shakespeare, who famously penned the line, wasn't speaking of humor, though. Its source, Hamlet, isn't widely known for its comedic antics, unless you find crazy people talking to skulls, ghosts, and imaginary audiences inherently amusing. No, the word "wit" would have been known to represent the wider meaning of intelligence or mental quickness.
Which, of course, heretofore and to-wit, is a prerequisite for deliberate comedy. But it's not always sufficient. Often, you need to set up a joke, and that takes time. It's still, usually, a good idea to do the setup as efficiently as possible, especially when someone knows that some sort of punchline is coming.
The punchline itself, naturally, needs to be concise, elegant, and brief.
One place where brevity shines in comedy is on a bumper sticker. It's important to use the fewest words possible to convey the joke, lest the people behind you swerve off the road or slam into your rear end in their attempt to read the whole thing. This also applies to the internet version of the bumper sticker, the picture meme. In that case, it's our short attention spans you have to cater to.
Brevity, however, relies on shared experience. You don't need a setup because you and the audience have already lived the setup. Which is why it's important to choose your audiences. One of my favorite non-bumper stickers is "Heisenberg may have slept here." Which, nowadays, a great number of people will scratch their heads over, because they'll be trying to fit it into a Breaking Bad reference, when it's actually a joke about quantum physics. (It also riffs on the old tourist sign "George Washington slept here," which, considering where I spent my childhood in northern Virginia, might have actually been true sometimes.)
So, to answer the question "Is brevity truly the soul of wit?" I can only proffer the response: Sometimes. |
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