In contrast to opening act Julian McCullough, Jim Gaffigan’s set involved drawn-out jokes and a slow, easygoing style.
In 2002, BBC reported surfing the Internet can result in a nine-second attention span — the same as that of a goldfish. Snapchats are sent in up to 10-second increments. Videos on Vine are just six.
That means the entertainment world — including the world of comedy — has seen its potential audience engagement time shrink drastically.
Some know how to work that time crunch. Julian McCullough, who opened for Jim Gaffigan in Student Entertainment Events’ Homecoming Comedy Show on Thursday night, rattled off a set of fast-paced punchlines, drawing from personal experiences ranging from a Chinatown bus ride to life with a new baby.
All the while, he gestured widely, maintained consistent eye contact and spoke relatively quickly. The crowd in Cole Field House ate it up, roaring with laughter at parts. His humor wasn’t sophisticated, but he was so passionate and energetic that the crowd responded with a lot of good laughs.
Gaffigan’s subsequent set was undeniably funny. He’s a veteran comedian with on-point food jokes; at one point, he asked, “When has peeling an orange ever been worth it?” His style is usually slower, and he takes more time to deliver jokes than some of his more up-to-the-minute counterparts.
But it seemed especially slow Thursday — perhaps all the food talk was making Gaffigan sleepy — and he didn’t deliver with the same level of energy and enthusiasm McCullough conveyed. I wondered if perhaps he was letting weariness or age show too much — he’s almost 50.
Yes, I was still entertained, but I found myself getting restless and a bit bored. As Gaffigan’s show neared 10 p.m., I started wondering, ‘When is this going to end?’
In an age when perception of time is governed by seconds, our time is precious — and everyone seems to be competing for it. We need more of everything: more jokes for our time, more distractions in between, more entertainment, more ways to distract us from the time we’re losing while entertaining ourselves. It’s a good thing when time flies but a bad thing when it creeps by slowly. The job of an entertainer is to make time fly without the audience realizing it’s flying.
We just can’t focus for that long anymore. We complain when the “umd-secure” Wi-Fi network is down for 15 minutes, barring us from checking Facebook or email. How can we sit through hours of jokes if they’re not diverse and exciting every second of the way? The high-energy, snappy comedian might win out over the one who takes a longer time to get to a hard-hitting punch line.
The slower form of comedy may have seen its heyday when people had more time to devote to entertainment or fewer distractions in the way. But this is the “now” generation, and thanks to the efficiency of smartphones and the Internet, people want the joke in a quick, exciting format, both to hear more jokes in a shorter time and to feel the immediate impact of the joke told.
Gaffigan’s sense of humor is funny and will probably be funny for many more years. But comedians with signature slow styles like his may face a decline unless they find ways to adapt to the fast-paced nature of their audiences.
