Towards a terminology for the practice of comic timing in contemporary composition: A practice-led engagement with humour in music across borders

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How might principles of comic timing from comedy be applicable to music composition? The principle of comic timing is well established in fields such as stand-up comedy, clowning, mime and physical theatre. For example, comedian Tim Vine plays with timing and expectation to make simple and even low-quality jokes funnier and stranger by reaching the punchline faster than the audience expects. Russian clown Slava Polunin, in one routine, carries out a mime sequence, establishing a scenario, before interrupting the flow of time through pausing, turning his head, and finally breaking the fourth wall to look at the audience. Composers may also use temporal devices such as unexpected pacing, pauses and repetition to dynamically provoke laughter and amusement. Gerald Barry's opera The Importance of Being Earnest (2012) forces Oscar Wilde's witty and complex language into short musical phrases, thus incongruously encoding unexpected new readings of the text. The slow movement of Jacob TV's String Quartet No. 3 disrupts the audience's perception of time passing with a repeated meditative phrase that rapidly crescendos and accelerates into an anti-climactic silence: it begins melodramatically but becomes farce. Yet, whilst there are countless examples of humorous music, scholarship on humour in music (let alone comic timing in music) is lacking and under theorised. In discussing challenges of analysing humour in the music of composer Erik Satie, Ann-Marie Hanlon suggests that "scholarly engagement with humour has been hindered by an uncertainty surrounding possible methodological approaches and the lack of a music-specific vocabulary for dealing with this subject" (Hanlon, 2013). To begin to address this deficit, my project will begin by engaging with historical and contemporary scholarship and theories of comic timing in other artistic practices to ascertain what principles might be translatable to music composition. The outputs of my PhD will comprise of both artistic research and scholarship. My artistic research will take the form of a portfolio of compositions, including a culminating one-hour music theatre work that will form the centrepiece of my submission. The work will be a realisation of comedy, clowning, and physical theatre mechanisms translated into musical mechanisms. It will be narrative-driven and feature simple lighting, costumes, and props. It will be staged by my ensemble Waste Paper Opera Company as part of Tete a Tete: The Opera Festival 2022. I will also engage with challenges related to ideas of comic timing in music across genres, cultural contexts and performance practices by reflecting on theories such as audience reception. I will apply these frameworks in a series of case-studies of humorous contemporary compositions, which will inform and inspire my own creative practice. The frameworks and terminology I establish will allow me to discuss and critically reflect on my own compositions in the second part of my commentary. I will also examine the politics of humour in a global and social context. Humour can expose the follies of the powerful and corrode existing power structures, such as in the work of Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby, who uses the historically male-dominated medium of stand-up comedy to lay bare its inherent complicity in maintaining male-dominated power structures. By contrast, the exclusionary and even destructive capacities of humour have become apparent, such as in recent critiques of comedian Louis CK, which have exposed his practice of making audiences complicit in his humiliating treatment of women by making them laugh. Humour in music works on a more abstract level. In that sense, music is socially embedded; humour in music, especially when created and performed in interdisciplinary contexts, has the potential to create a sense of social or transcultural togetherness, or to be perceived as exclusionary.