Comedians have a more complicated relationship with time than you might expect. When people talk about comedy skills they often say “timing” without being clear about what that means. I suspect most of them don’t even know.

Rhythm of delivery from word choices and emphasis makes a difference to the effectiveness of a joke, but it’s probably over-emphasized. Timing helps delivery, but time-management and time-keeping are critical.

Going overtime is a cardinal sin for comedians. Ramble on indefinitely and you’ll exhaust the goodwill of the audience, the venue management and every other comic there. I’ve always found it frustrating that time-keeping is important but there’s no clocks and it’s uncool to check your watch. I always thought there should be a clock.

…at least until I saw Pete Holmes’ brilliant show Crashing. If you likeTV shows about stand-up comedy, Crashing and I’m Dying Up Here are essential viewing. Season 3 has an episode where the characters perform in a generic comedy venue that’s part of a chain owned by a corporation. The stage has a built-in countdown clock, a symbol of how sanitized and soulless it all is. I’d still find the clock helpful, though.

I always felt restricted by the five-minute limit at our local open mics. 300 seconds is a lot of time to a comic with a bunch of one-liners but not so much if you prefer long-form comedy, or want to deep-dive into a theme. Still, it’s better than the 2 minute limits that many open mic venues in America have for comics in their first two years.

Last year I was lucky enough to do some longer “showcase” sets of 20+ minutes. It was one of my main comedic goals last year, so I was glad to be able to write something longer, with narrative structure and jokes that had a bit more substance. Musically I’ve always preferred albums over singles, and I assumed my style would better lend itself to this format.

The result, after doing a few longer sets, isn’t quite what I expected. My assumption that I’d do better with longer sets didn’t quite match up with the experience. One one occasion, which I mentioned in another post, I failed hard and discovered that dying on stage is even less fun when the agony is extended. I’ve discovered that I can do well or badly on both platforms for different reasons and I’m not necessarily as much of a long-form guy as I thought.

When people talk about longer sets they often make the same observations; You can “breathe” more, delivering your material in a more relaxed way. There’s more space for error and more time for banter. There’s less requirement for quick zingers, that your LPM (laughs per minute) ratio doesn’t matter as much.

It’s all true, of course. But it’s not the whole truth. A colleague asked about doing longer sets at the end of last year and I made a few notes…

It’s a huge memory test. You can remember a 7-digit phone number, but could you remember a 28-digit phone number? Remembering a 28 digit number is more than 4x harder than the seven digit one, so you can imagine that remembering 20 minutes of material is a completely different beast to memorizing 5.

I struggle occasionally with memory for a five minute set and that’s not alcohol or Alzheimer’s like you probably think it is. The environmental stressors, because the pressure and the lights and audience judgement and time limits aren’t the best conditions for a memory test, and it’s usually new material.

The model I hear described in cities overseas is that a comic can perform the same set 20+ a week and by the time they slowly build up 20+minutes of material they know it inside out and can perform it in their sleep.

In Townsville a comic might get one opportunity a month to do a 5-minute set, and they can’t afford to repeat themselves much. I’ve written maybe 90 minutes of material and I haven’t been able to repeat much of it. Even if I don’t do anything new it’s still going to be material I’ve only done once or twice before.

Pacing is critical. In another lifetime I wrote dance music and did the occasional DJ set, and it taught me a lot about dynamics. What people think they want is 100% energy all the time, but in reality nobody actually wants to go for an hour+ at 100%. It’s exhausting, you’ve got nowhere to go when you want a climax and without contrast the whole thing becomes a long stream of generic mush.

It’s tempting to come out at 100% and try to maintain it for the whole duration. It seems like the thing we should be aiming for. But it won’t work. You have to create contrast, make sure there’s highs and lows. No comic wants to deliberately introduce low points or risk a single minute without laughter, but you have to do it if you want to go the distance.

Switching styles is important. I remember being told that magicians won’t do the same trick twice for an audience because the risk of the crowd working out how it’s done goes up about a thousand percent. Jokes usually work by surprise so they tend to operate the same way. If you repeat a joke formula the way someone keeps using an effective combo in games like Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat you run the risk of becoming less effective when people work out what you’re doing.

It’ll be like watching a magician pull a rabbit out of a hat, then pull flowers out of the hat, then pull a scarf out of the hat, then pull a dove out of the hat… You’ve been watching them do the same trick for five minutes. Even if you still don’t know how they did it you have some theories,and if he’s still pulling shit out of the hat ten minutes later you’ll unsubscribe.

All jokes have/are formulas. Misdirect jokes are short and get a high laugh-per-minute ratio but you can’t do too many without the formula showing (the mathematical formula for misdirect jokes is the Abelian Group). People latch on at the subconscious level and the jokes start being less effective. The formula for puns is even more transparent (“Some words sound like other words!”) so it’s hard to get away with lots of puns in a row.

It applies to all the joke styles – the law of Diminishing Returns kicks in. You might do a successful five minute set with a single joke structure but there’s just no way to do the same trick for twenty minutes without everyone catching on. You’re going to have to switch up your techniques every few minutes to stay ahead.

Narrative will help you. Five minute sets don’t necessarily need an over-arching theme or story structure, and people don’t particularly expect one. This changes with longer sets: I’m happy to watch a three minute music video with a bunch of cool imagery and sequences that aren’t connected but it’s going to be hard to watch a two-hour movie like that. The longer you want my attention, the more I need to see a theme, narrative or structure. I need to know there’s a destination or point.

Personally, I prefer a bit of a theme or narrative. Watching 20 straight minutes of disconnected one-lines is exhausting and unrewarding for me. Jimmy Carr might be excellent at what he does, but 15 minutes into his specials I’ve had enough, can kind of see what he’s doing over and over, and don’t feel like it’s going anywhere. I suspect I could fall asleep and wake up just before the end without feeling like I missed anything. Knowing that seriously reduces my care factor.

More importantly though, you’re going to have an easier time presenting a narrative. It’s easier on the memory. Remembering a 20-minute long story is a feat, but remembering 100 random one-liners that don’t relate to each other is is seriously hard. If you put your long set together with a coherent narrative you make it a lot easier to remember what you’re doing onstage.

You have room for tags and callbacks. Tags are great because you can increase your laughs-per-minute by using the same premise for multiple punchlines. I don’t get to explore everything about an idea in a short set. Sometimes I’ll have to make my point, deliver my punch and move on. With a longer set I can properly extract everything funny out of a premise. Given that it actually makes the material more economical, I’d be mad not to in a longer set.

Everyone loves callbacks. There’s a few reasons why they’re so effective. The main three for me is that they reinforce the idea that there’s a structure or narrative going on, and it just makes the set feel smarter and more designed. The other is that it reminds an audience about something we all shared and enjoyed earlier, which is a bonding and positive experience. Third, it lets me get another laugh out of a joke that worked, just like tags do. Effective callbacks make sets better and I’d write them into everything I do if I could.

I can’t though. It’s almost impossible to do a great callback with a short set. You need distance between the joke and the call-back to it, or it just feels like another tag and you run the risk of looking like you’re flogging a dead horse (over-tagging is starting to become a thing and I’ve heard some comics warn against it). But a longer set? Sure; You can insert one or two really powerful callbacks and it’ll create laughter and bonding and warmth.

The ghosts of Christmas past, present and future. Somebody once told me that the formula for effective public speaking is “Tell ’em what you’re going to tell ’em, Tell ’em, and then Tell ’em what you told ’em.” That doesn’t apply as well to stand-up but a longer set is all about earning trust and rewarding trust.

Giving people a glimpse of what to expect, delivering on it and using the nostalgia of callbacks to bond an audience and demonstrate that there’s a plan and structure behind the words will be like MSG for a longer set. It’ll make your job easier.

Of course I still haven’t done a ton of longer sets and these are just my personal impressions. We all have different ways of doing what we do. I assumed I’d be a thousand percent better if I only had more time up there, and it’s been interesting learning that I wasn’t necessarily right about that.

I wish that my scene offered enough stage time and fresh audiences to perform jokes hundreds of times and confidently build long sets gradually that way, but it’s not a characteristic of my local comedy scene and I suspect comics all over the world who don’t happen to be in New York, Los Angeles or London might be in a similar position. Long sets present unique challenges and they need a strategic approach.