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PSA: A guy at a comedy open mic told me the average dad joke gets 4.7 seconds of silence before the laugh, and I have been timing mine at home ever since
I was at this little open mic at a pizza place in Boise two weeks back, mostly to watch a friend bomb, and this older comic hung around after and we got talking about groaners. He said he read somewhere that the average dad joke lands after about 4.7 seconds of quiet, which he called the sweet spot, because anyone still in the room after that is committed to laughing. I did not believe him at first, so I started testing it on my kids at dinner. I would drop a pun like asking why the scarecrow won an award, and I just counted in my head instead of laughing at my own line. Turns out the longer I wait, the bigger the payoff, but if I go past 8 seconds it just gets awkward and my wife starts scrolling her phone. The weird part is the pause does half the work, the joke itself barely matters. So now I want to know, do you guys build the silence into how you tell them, or do you just fire and forget?
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noahclark1mo ago
Oh man, the pause totally does the heavy lifting!
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