Timing as a craft — stand-up, sketch, storytelling and spoken word, and the theories of why any of it lands.
8 topics · 9 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
The Art of the Story-Teller
Marie L. Shedlock · 1915
Sets out oral storytelling as a performance discipline distinct from reading aloud, built on selecting the right tale, cutting it to its bones, and…
+1 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Lectures on the English Comic Writers
William Hazlitt · 1819
Reads English comic writers from Chaucer to the Restoration dramatists on the premise that wit is the perception of incongruity while humour is…
+3 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Chironomia: or, A Treatise on Rhetorical Delivery
Gilbert Austin · 1806
Sets out a notation system for gesture, posture and voice in oratory, arguing that a speech's delivery is a technique that can be studied, notated…
+2 more at this level
9 works
Marie L. Shedlock
Sets out oral storytelling as a performance discipline distinct from reading aloud, built on selecting the right tale, cutting it to its bones, and using voice and timing rather than gesture to hold an audience.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Kathryn E. Boudreau
Argues that slam poetry's competitive, audience-judged format gives children a structured way to perform and validate their own cultural and personal experience, doing pedagogical work silent reading of poetry cannot.
link checked 17 Sept 2026William Hazlitt
Reads English comic writers from Chaucer to the Restoration dramatists on the premise that wit is the perception of incongruity while humour is sympathy with a character's absurdity, and that the two demand different techniques from a writer.
link checked 17 Sept 2026George Meredith
Argues that comedy is society's corrective for pretension and inequality, and that a genuinely comic society requires intellectual equals — including women — capable of laughing at themselves.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Mihaela Viorica Constantinescu
Analyses Romanian comedians performing abroad and argues that a comedian's on-stage persona is what lets them turn immigrant stereotypes into subversive humour that exposes, rather than reinforces, the power structures behind the joke.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Afeez K. Ayinde & Adesina B. Sunday
Examines Nigerian prank-comedy skits and argues their humour is built less from a scripted joke than from the pragmatic acts creators use to provoke a target and then exploit the target's unscripted reaction.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Gilbert Austin
Sets out a notation system for gesture, posture and voice in oratory, arguing that a speech's delivery is a technique that can be studied, notated and drilled rather than left to natural gift.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Henri Bergson
Argues that we laugh at the mechanical encrusted on the living — a person behaving like an automaton — and that laughter is a social corrective aimed at inflexibility.
about 2.5 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Sigmund Freud
Analyses jokes as a technique — condensation, displacement, indirect representation — that lets forbidden aggressive and sexual impulses past the censor for a moment of pleasure, structurally akin to dreamwork.
about 5.5 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026