12 minutes to punchline and counting.

                                         Still from The IT Crowd, a futuristic sitcom about floating sofas.


I've been watching a lot of sitcoms recently.  Not just for funpies - oh no - I've been watching them with serious intent.  Serious intent and a stopwatch.

I've been working on a submission for a sitcom writing competition and have pretty much got the story down, plus some cracking jokes (not all knob gags as well).  What the submission currently lacks, and what I've got a little over a fortnight to rectify, is a sense of pace.  This is where the intensive sitcom watching comes in.

The main thing I've been looking at is the time distance in-between the feed line - the bit introducing the joke - and the punch line -  the bit you laugh at.  I've come to the disappointing conclusion that there is no such thing as an optimal distance between the two.

Take 'Calamity Jen', the second episode from the first series of Graham Linehan's The IT Crowd:  Almost immediatly we are fed a funny advert  - in the style of one of them directory enquiries ads that surfaced when it was decided that BT shouldn't be the only ones allowed to rip us off for raising the most basic query (though hopefully this whole practice will be quickly killed off by smartphones)* - about  a change in the emergency services number.  the new number is very difficult to recite.  This whole sequence acts as a feed line for a joke that doesn't come to fruition for another twelve minutes, or more if you're watching it as it's broadcast.  It is a very good joke.

However, in the same episode, there is an example of the very opposite.  About 16 minutes in a Japanese businessman is given a pair of Doc Marten's as a gift and encouraged to stomp around in them.  Less than a minute later, he stamps on a character's already mangled foot.  This a very quick set up and pay-off.

But if we look closer, we can see that there is more at work.  It is about ten minutes prior to this joke that we are shown that this character has a mangled foot, and we are introduced to the thing that mangles her feet - a pair of red shoes - in the opening shots of the episode.  All these elements come to an apex about 17 minutes in.  Someone have their foot stamped on isn't all that funny.  Someone having their foot stamped on by a foreign businessman, when their foot has already been mangled by a pair of shoes they simply couldn't resist, is hilarious.

So in a nutshell, the length between the feed line and the punch line doesn't really matter.  What does matter is the various elements that come together to form the feed line.