Fiction and standup comedy

Benjamin Stevenson is the author of the recent instant-classic Christie-style mystery novel, Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone–its sequel, Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect, is also excellent. In an interview with Lenny Picker, Stevenson says:

I started working as a stand-up comic, which I actually think gave me a lot of skills that I could then put into mystery fiction when I decided to write, because jokes are all about hiding the answers and surprising audiences. And so, I already knew how to hide a plot twist, and how to deliver suspense and surprise, because that’s how you get a laugh.

This is interesting to me because I think I’m pretty good at figuring things out and making things clear, but I’m not so good at misdirection, suspense, and surprise. For doing science, I’d argue that being bad at misdirection is kind of a good thing: like any good mathematician, I prefer the sort of brute-force approach that is directly amenable to generalization. My directness makes me a worse chess or poker player, so there are tradeoffs here.

I do think suspense and surprise are important, both in literature and in the way we learn from stories more generally. Hidden answers and surprises can come naturally, and sometimes I can tell a good story by just relating the events in the order that they came to me, for example in the 52 stories and 52 class-participation activities in our Active Statistics book. But it’s more of a challenge for me to go in and hide the clues, in the way that Agatha Christie and Benjamin Stevenson do so well.

P.S. More on suspense in this post, Why do we prefer familiarity in music and surprise in stories?

P.P.S. I went on youtube and watched one of Stevenson’s standup routines. It didn’t impress me much. That’s fine, I guess I’m just not part of his intended audience. His books are so clever and charming that I just assumed I’d love his spoken comedy as well, but it didn’t work that way.