Comedic pauses are an essential part of stand-up comedy. They can help make your material easier for the audience to understand, create comedic tension before the punchline, and give the audience time to solve your joke and begin laughing.

Let’s start off with an example of amazing comedic timing. Notice how the pause directly in front of the punchline creates tons of comedic tension and prepares you to start laughing. 

The first few seconds of the “Berlitz German Coastguard” commercial below are in German. The rest is in English. 

4 Ways to Use Pauses In Your Material

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There are 4 basic ways to use pauses in stand-up comedy. 

1. Taking a breath
2. Creating comedic tension before the punchline
3. Giving the audience time to process your joke and start laughing
4. “Micro-pauses” to break down sentences into smaller chunks that are easier for the audience to understand. 

We’ll skip the first way to use pauses in comedy, as it’s too obvious. 

Using Pauses to Create Comedic Tension

By creating comedic tension, I mean that you get the audience leaning forward anticipating the punchline. You probably already know that there’s often a contrast between the setup and the punchline. Pauses are an effective way of highlighting the upcoming contrast. You’re essentially giving the audience a subtle hint that the punchline is coming, which boosts the chances that they’ll both recognize and laugh at the punchline. 

This is what makes the Berlitz German Coastguard commercial so funny. Directly before the punchline, the coast guard has this pause where he creates an obvious contrast between the setup and the punchline. If you were to hit pause on the video between the pause and the punchline, you’d know that a punchline was coming… even though you wouldn’t know what that punchline was. 

This makes a great punchline. You can anticipate that something funny is going to happen, which means as an audience member you start preparing yourself to laugh, but at the same time you don’t know exactly what the punchline will be… so you still get the surprise inside the punchline. 

Giving The Audience Time After the Punchline

Even simple jokes require a basic level of problem-solving to understand. That problem-solving takes time. Add to that that many people in the audience have been drinking and you can see why giving the audience plenty of time to both understand the joke and start laughing is so important. 

The most important thing to know about pausing after a punchline is that if you’re not sure how long to pause, it’s better for your pause to be too long rather than for too short. If your pause is too short, you risk stepping on the laughs (cutting down the laughter you would have gotten by starting your next joke too soon). However if your pause is a bit longer than normal… nothing significant happens. If anything, you end up looking more relaxed on stage, which can put the audience at ease if you’re nervous. 

The rule-of-thumb for how long to pause after hitting a punchline is to wait until the laughter is beginning to die down, then start your next joke. Wait for the laughter to peak so that you give the audience enough time to fully enjoy the joke. You don’t need to wait for complete silence. It’s usually best to begin your next joke around half way between the peak laughs and when you think the laugh would end. 

Micro-Pauses

Micro-pauses are a natural part of everyday speech. Whenever we speak, we group together words inside of a sentence to make them easier for the listener to digest. 

Take a sentence like “Yesterday I was going to the gym, but I couldn’t find a parking spot.” This would be broken down into 3-4 groups of words with very small pauses between them. This lets the listener take a group of words on condense them into a single idea to remember. When you finish your sentence, the listener will completely understand you.

This is very useful in comedy because you want your punchlines to hit as hard as possible. The quality of the laugh you get is going to depend on how well your audience understood your setup. By taking a big idea and breaking it up into 3-4 easily digestible chunks, you ensure that the audience will completely understand the setup and be ready for your punchline. However, if you were to speak your lines too fast or not break ideas into chunks then you risk the audience focusing too much on understand the setup that they don’t have time to appreciate the punchline. 

…and those are the 4 ways to get the most out of pauses when performing or writing stand-up comedy. If you enjoyed this article, check out our YouTube channel or our online courses at OnlineComedyTraining.com.