"How shall I time my manuscript?" is the puzzling problem the new writer asks himself. The answer is that it is very difficult to time a monologue exactly, because different performers work at different speeds and laughs delay the delivery and, therefore, make the monologue run longer. But here is a very rough counting scale that may be given, with the warning that it is far from exact:
For every one hundred and fifteen to one hundred and forty words count one minute for delivery. This is so inexact, depending as it does on the number of laughs and the monologist's speed of delivery, that it is like a rubber ruler. At one performance it may be too long, at another too short.
Having given a full fifteen minutes of material, filled, let us hope, with good points made up of grins, chuckles and laughs, now choose your very biggest laugh-point for the last. When you wrote the monologue and arranged it into the first routine, that biggest laugh may have been the tenth, or the ninth, or the fifteenth, but you have spotted it unerringly as the very biggest laugh you possess, so you blend it in as the final laugh of the completed monologue.
It may now be worth while thus to sum up the ideal structure:
A routine is so arranged that the introduction stamps the monologist as bright, and the character he is impersonating or telling about as a real "character." The first four points or gags are snickers and the fifth or sixth is a laugh. [1] Each point or gag blends perfectly into the ones preceding and following it. The introduction of each new story awakens a grin, its development causes a chuckle, and the point-line itself raises a laugh. The final point or gag rounds the monologue off in the biggest burst of honest laughter.
[1] It is true that some monologists strive for a laugh on the very first point, but to win a big laugh at once is very rare.
IV. BUILDING A MONOLOGUE BEFORE AN AUDIENCE
When a writer delivers the manuscript of a monologue to a monologist his work is not ended. It has just begun, because he must share with the monologist the pains of delivering the monologue before an audience. Dion Boucicault once said, "A play is not written, but rewritten." True as this is of a play, it is, if possible, even more true of a monologue.
Of course, not all beginners can afford to give this personal attention to staging a monologue, but it is advisable whenever possible. For, points that the author and the monologist himself were sure would "go big," "die," while points and gags that neither thought much of, "go big." It is for precisely this purpose of weeding out the good points and gags from the bad that even famous monologists "hide away," under other names, in very small houses for try-outs. And while the monologist is working on the stage to make the points and gags "get over," the author is working in the audience to note the effect of points and finding ways to change a phrase here and a word there to build dead points into life and laughter. Then it is that they both realize that Frank Fogarty's wise words are true: "There is only one way to tell a gag. If you can cut one word out from any of my gags I'll give you five dollars, for it's worth fifty to me. Words are costly."
Some entire points and gags will be found to be dead beyond resurrection, and even whole series of gags and points must be cast away and new and better ones substituted to raise the golden laughs. So the monologue is changed and built performance after performance, with both the monologist and the author working as though their very lives depended on making it perfect.