My dad loves to tell stories about his family. I hope half of them are true, because the shenanigans that happened in his family can hardly be believed.

One of the tamer of the memorable stories comes from the 1950s, when televisions were first being sold. My grandfather (his dad) had bought the first TV in the neighborhood for his own parents, and the whole family decided to send the parents out on a joyride while it was delivered. After it was installed, the siblings and grandchildren hid in the house, waiting for the parents’ return.

You can imagine them, right? Hiding behind couches and curtains, peeking around doorways, waiting, waiting. Waiting for the doorknob to turn and the first steps in before they yell in unison, “Surprise!”

Well, my Uncle Pat was restless. He was young, after all, just a little boy. He didn’t have much practice at waiting. So, when he saw his grandparents’ car pull into the driveway, he tried and tried, but couldn’t contain himself any longer. He tore through the living room, out the front door and down the front lawn. “We bought you a television!” he screamed, half in sheer delight and half relief.

We’ve all experienced something like this—well, at least, like the waiting part. Silence can be anticipation. It can be waiting for what we know is coming, and waiting eagerly.

The magnificent drumroll

Young kids know the feeling every year when one present and then another starts to accumulate under the Christmas tree. What’s in them? What kind of gift might be that shape and size? “Oh, Mom and Dad, can’t you just give me a hint?”

Or you can imagine a young man who’s decided to propose to his girlfriend. He’s chosen the ring, he’s bought it, and now he’s carrying it around—maybe in his pocket, but at the very least in his mind. Every time he’s with her, he wants to give it to her, slip it on her finger. But he waits. And waits. For just the right moment, when the gift will be perfect. Silence. Anticipation. Of course, the young woman might suspect something too. As my own wife told me when we were dating, she’ll know when I’m thinking about proposing. After all, how could you hide something like that? How could you disguise it? She had a point. I hadn’t gone around proposing to other women for practice.

You can remember the beautiful experience if you’ve learned to appreciate silence as anticipation. You know something’s coming, something good. You just don’t know what it is yet. And the waiting is actually part of the gift. The magnificent drumroll.

We experience anticipation as a use of silence in every great narrative, every good film, every moving story. There’s a moment, and perhaps more than one, when all our hopes are pinned on what happens next. And instead of rushing into that moment, we and the story pause, as if we’re accumulating the desire, the bravery, the momentum to sail in, no matter what. And then we do, we sail in.

Our life, for better and for worse, unfolds in time. One of the gifts of time, as Albert Einstein has joked, is that it keeps everything from happening at once.[1] But time also means that some things we’d like to happen now, won’t. We’ll have to wait for it.

We’re not omnipotent; we can’t do everything; which is why it’s reorienting to rest. We’re also not omniscient; we don’t know everything; which is why we’re sometimes unready for the answer we crave and instead receive the silence we need. In anticipation, we learn that our limitations will involve waiting on a regular basis—which is wonderful, since waiting creates the perfect conditions for learning how to fully appreciate what comes after the waiting.

There are two kinds of silence as anticipation I’d like to highlight for your consideration.

The laughter waiting in the silence

The first is the comedic pause. Comic timing. That moment, even a long moment of silence that makes the punch line that much more hilarious. A moment at just the right moment that becomes hilarious in its own right.[2]

Gene Wilder was a master of this. Do you remember the scene where his character, Willy Wonka, emerges from his legendary factory for the first time, to a crowd of gobsmacked onlookers? Five lucky children stand clutching their golden tickets, and the whole town stands huddled behind them at the gates, wondering, who is this Willy Wonka, this wizard behind all of their favorite candies, the man who has never shown his face in public in his life, not until this moment?

The moment arrives, and Wonka exits the front door of his factory, heading toward the front gate. He is, however, not what the crowd expects. You can tell immediately by their own silence. He’s hunched over, and carrying a cane. Every time he moves forward, the cane raps loudly on the brick path. His left foot juts forward, and the cane taps on his right. His right foot limps forward, then his left and the cane tap, then his right. The crowd, in the meanwhile, watches in continued and stunned silence. They don’t know what to make of this inventor of gobstoppers, this man who . . . now wait, his cane has stuck in the bricks and he’s walked on past it . . . Oh no, he’s clutching for the cane that is no longer there! He’s tipping forward, about to fall on his face! And then, in a shocking and graceful motion, Willy Wonka tumbles into a somersault, lands on his feet (caneless) and salutes the crowd. The limping had all been a ruse, and his real self has now emerged even more technicolor from that first, constricted version. Wonka’s true self has materialized in the silence, and transformed him entirely, far more than if he had simply walked to the gate in the first place.

This is a silence that occurs almost within a silence. Gene Wilder has many other comedic pauses that appear unexpectedly, mid-sentence. It’s virtually his trademark style of delivery, and sometimes filmmakers even write with his gift in mind. For instance, in the film Blazing Saddles, he’s put in the town jail, and his cellmate asks, “What’s your name?” He responds, “Well, my name is Jim, but most people just call me . . . Jim.” Dozens of other examples, which speak much better for themselves, can be found in a supercut on YouTube titled simply, “Gene Wilder: Master of the Comedic Pause.”[3]

This comedic pause, which some people refer to as comic timing, can also take on other layers, such as tagging. Most comedians are quite happy to have a live audience laugh loudly after any of their jokes, but a tag is an extra line that’s meant to interrupt the laughter. It adds a new dimension to a joke and, hopefully, lands an even bigger laugh. Greg Dean, a Los Angeles comic, shares this example with the writer of a 2017 article:

“For Father’s Day I took my father out. It only took seven shots.” After the audience laughs at that, I might add something like, “Most people don’t get their priest that drunk.” That’s a tag, adding a new twist that surprises the audience and keeping them laughing.

Normally you don’t want to interrupt laughter, but tag timing is different, Dean said. The key is to deliver the tag when the audience is taking its breath after the initial burst of laughter. A good comedian can ratchet up the laughter with repeated tags and even begin to train the audience to hold its breath, to anticipate the tag like a dancer anticipates a change in a drummer’s beat.[4]

The silence of comic timing, the comedic pause, rewards the patient. It even rewards those who are already laughing, unaware that the gift of the joke is about to keep on giving.

The unknown waiting in the silence

The other kind of anticipation is the dramatic pause. And here we will consider perhaps the most famous example of such a silence, one that very well may have caused public panic. It’s the moment when actor/director Orson Welles informed radio listeners across the country that Martians had invaded New Jersey.

The intent was never to deceive anyone, Welles insisted the day afterward, when papers across the country featured him on their front page, insisting he had caused mass riots. All he was trying to do was to dramatize H.G. Wells’s science fiction novel War of the Worlds. The novel portrays an alien invasion, and Welles played it up as realistically as he could. He and his team adapted the novel into a series of authentic-sounding news reports covering the landings and encounters, news reports that were meant to sound indistinguishable from the typical news reports of the day. As was the style of the day, these separate “live” reports were interspersed with calm musical tracks. Any audience tuning in to this channel mid-broadcast might well think they were hearing a news program. They might stay tuned to get an update. An update that turns out to announce, with believable shock, an episode of interplanetary proportions, unfolding in a small town in New Jersey.

At one point in the 40-minute broadcast, one “reporter” covering what is now believed to be a Martian landing announces quite nervously that he is going to approach the spacecraft, which is now being investigated by police. Over the next few seconds, there is a cut to gentle piano music, and then back to the reporter. As he describes the police’s movements and then the aliens’ reactions in play-by-play, his voice becomes more animated and concerned, reaching its climax when he screams that the aliens have begun to incinerate the police officers. The fire begins to engulf the area, and the reporter continues to narrate frantically:

“It’s spreading everywhere, it’s coming this way now, it’s about 20 yards to my right . . .”

And at this point, exactly at this point, Welles cuts the audio. The broadcast goes silent, just like Forrest Gump experiences in the Washington Mall. Except that this time, it was planned. Everyone was in on it. Everyone, that is, except for the listeners. What they heard was six seconds of silence, an eternity long for radio standards. Then, eventually, they heard another voice enter the broadcast, with the shockingly calm news: “Ladies and gentlemen, due to circumstances beyond our control, we are unable to continue the broadcast from Grover’s Mill.”[5]

Remember that the year of this “fake news” broadcast was 1938. Nothing like this had ever been done before on such a trusted medium. As a result, Radiolab estimates that of the possible 12 million people listening to the broadcast, nearly 1 in 12 thought it was true, “and . . . some percentage of that 1 million people ran out of their homes.” Many near the supposed site of the alien landing even jumped into their cars and evacuated the area.

All this because of a dramatic pause. Supposedly, Welles had to strong-arm the broadcasters to insert this six-second, planned silence. The network was convinced that listeners would think the signal had dropped, that the station was no longer on the air. Welles didn’t care. He knew the effect a dramatic silence could have at just the right moment, which is why this War of the Worlds broadcast is one of the few things remembered so powerfully from the year 1938.

Dramatic pauses aren’t always used for trickery, though—for mere dramatic effect. Often, they can suddenly deepen the meaning of an already meaningful message, like a tag that creates tears instead of laughs. They can create both anticipation as well as resonance, a surprising combination of both anticipation and answer. A compelling instance occurred in March 2018, nearly 80 years after Orson Welles fooled the public. It was delivered by a high school senior. Here’s some context:

On Valentine’s Day, 2018, a gunman opened fire in Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.[6] Over a frantic six minutes, he killed 17 people and injured 17 others. The shooter then shed his gear and blended in with the crowd of terrified students as they fled the scene, only to be arrested an hour later in a nearby city. The dramatic pause I’m about to share doesn’t come from that day, but from a rally the following month where fellow student Emma Gonzalez was asked to speak at a rally called March for Our Lives.

By the time of this rally, in late March of 2018, Emma had already become a de facto spokesperson for the Parkland community. Her friends had died too, but she was asked to speak because she was gifted with eloquence and the bravery to use it, despite her young age. In this speech, it would not be her words she would be remembered for, but the eloquence of her silence. Her dramatic pause may go down as one of the longest and most complex in rhetorical history.

“Six minutes and about twenty seconds,” Emma begins, “In a little over six minutes, 17 of our friends were taken from us . . . and absolutely everyone in the Douglas community was forever altered.” With passion recognizable in any speech like this, she names each of the slain students, describing things they would never again do. But when she reaches the end of her list, she stops talking. She continues to gaze out at the crowd, a solid tear stream down the left side of her face. At first, in the silence, the crowd cries with her. They may think Emma is too moved to continue. But her silence continues. Some, from the looks on their faces, become convinced she is angry. “Never again,” many begin to chant, until the whole crowd has taken up the vow. But Emma is still silent. The chant fades out. Is she paralyzed, suddenly overcome by stage fright and too afraid to continue? One friend approaches her on the stage, mouthing the words, “We love you.” She ignores him, continuing to face the crowd. Many by this point are exasperated, dumbfounded. What is Emma doing? How is she comfortable with this silence when clearly no one else is, this certainly respectful moment of silence, but one that has now stretched across minutes and minutes? Anticipation. Anticipation. Until at last a timer rings out from her podium and she silences it.

“Since the time that I came out here,” she says through tears, “it has been six minutes and twenty seconds. The shooter has ceased shooting, and will soon abandon his rifle, blend in with the students as they escape, and walk free for an hour before arrest. Fight for your lives, before it’s someone else’s job.” Then she walks off the stage, leaving a dumbfounded crowd now cheering and increasingly aware of the silence they had just experienced, both what it meant and what it means.

I remember my own reaction when I watched this video, other than finding tissues as quickly as I could. I had read about the effectiveness of the speech, but no one had explained the silence in advance for me either. I was just as stunned, confused, even impatient, as the crowd had been. When I was brave enough, I rewatched the clip, knowing this time what was unfolding, why Emma created this long measure of silence, what the anticipation means, in all of its complexity, and how for her that waiting, waiting, waiting despite any call for relief symbolizes the intolerable waiting for change on the issue of gun violence, the issue that had morphed from an imaginary idea into a tragedy that tore a bullet hole through the life of her school. I realized that this silence itself was an act of solidarity with the dead, and a call to the living.

Living in the in-between

So, now that we’re familiar with both, what is the difference between a dramatic pause and comedic pause? How do we know which one is happening when we experience a silence of anticipation, a silence we want to reach closure? How do we know that Gene Wilder isn’t going to panic and forget his lines? How do we know he’s not going to face-plant into the brick walkway? How do we know, especially in those first seconds and minutes, that Emma Gonzalez isn’t playing a joke on her audience?

We don’t. Every time we experience the silence of anticipation, we live in the in-between, we live in that silence, and we lean forward. The silence of anticipation borrows its power from our imagination of what might happen next. All of the possibilities. We might even come to understand that the silence of anticipation is as powerful and rich as the future that will end it. We’re living at the nexus of a forking path, where things could turn out wonderfully, or horribly, hilariously, or satisfactorily, or most likely some combination. As a result, we’re put back in touch with the stakes of reality. The point is not for us to worry in these moments; the point is for us to care. If we always got things immediately when we wanted them, we’d probably never learn how to care.

And so, the difference in experiencing our silent anticipations as drama or as comedy comes down both to our own experience and to what we believe about the way things end. Do we see life ultimately as tragedy, or as comedy? Do we believe in happy endings—or are those just the stuff of fairy tales? As Frederick Buechner proposes, in his book Telling the Truth, the Gospel, that good news that is not fake news but in fact real, real news, that Gospel is tragedy. It is also comedy. And it is fairy tale, in the best sense of that term. All at the same time.[7]

Johann Sebastian Bach believed that too, centuries ago. Which is why, when he wrote his Mass in B Minor, he depicted the crucifixion of Jesus as a choral sequence (“Crucifixus”) that dwindles and dwindles, weaker and weaker, until it ends in silence, silence, silence. A longer pause than we’d expect to experience from an orchestra and chorus. But then, like a bolt of lightning, the choir leaps in with cries of resurrection. You almost fall out of your seat; and that’s the point. Bach’s silence welcomes us into the sudden jolt of it all, what Tolkien has called a eucatastrophe —where suddenly, without warning, everything suddenly, violently, works together for good.[8]

[1] This quote, sometimes attributed to Einstein but probably someone else’s, is discussed here: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2019/07/06/time/.

[2] A good introduction to comic timing can be found here: https://www.thecut.com/2017/05/the-art-and-science-of-comedic-timing.html.

[3] The super cut “Gene Wilder: Master of the Comedic Pause,” can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFq9AbVZSbo&t=1s.

[4] Greg Dean’s joke was shared in the article reference in note 2, above.

[5] The story of Orson Welles and the infamous War of the Worlds broadcast is discussed here: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/10/30/241797346/75-years-ago-war-of-the-worlds-started-a-panic-or-did-it, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/infamous-war-worlds-radio-broadcast-was-magnificent-fluke-180955180/, and http://www.radiolab.org/story/91622-war-of-the-worlds/.

[6] An overview of the Parkland shooting can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoneman_Douglas_High_School_shooting, while Emma Gonzalez’s March for Our Lives speech can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u46HzTGVQhg.

[7] Buechner, Frederick. Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale. New York: Harper and Row, 1977.

[8] A recording of this section from Bach’s Mass in B Minor can be heard here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnrXLPG6iek, while an overview of Tolkien’s idea of eucatastrophe can be found here: http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Eucatastrophe.

Selah

What are you waiting for? No, I’m not urging you to action with those words. I’m inviting you to consider these questions:

What story loops are open in your life and not yet closed? Where are you waiting, and what are you waiting for?

If you’re willing, please use a few minutes of silence to name those meaningful specifics for yourself, to remind yourself of what closure would look and feel and sound like. Write it down.

A key part of honoring the silence of anticipation is simply to be yourself in it.

Your Turn

One of the gifts of time is that events unfold. Things don’t happen all at once. We have to wait, and we also get to wait. Here are some ways you can practice the use of silence as anticipation:

●      Is there an important event coming up in your life? Or important events you celebrate each year (for instance, a holiday)? How might you build some silent anticipation into the space before that event? For instance, let’s choose Christmas, the holiday with the most tangible anticipations built in. You might count down the days to Christmas by marking them off a calendar. You might buy an Advent calendar and interact with it each day. You might do as some have done and move the figures in their nativity scene gradually from opposite ends of the house, and toward the same location until they finally arrive at the same place on Christmas day.[1]

●      How might you imaginatively create and even celebrate your anticipation of another important event in your life with equal gusto to those Christmas options?

●      Watch the super cut of Gene Wilder’s comedic timing. Practice telling a good joke that requires momentary silence.

●      If it’s your job to give a speech or deliver a talk, build a meaningful moment of silence into it.

[1] A description of moving nativity figures gradually toward Christmas Day can be found here:

https://outdoornativitystore.com/blog/placing-christ-child-magi-nativity-scenes/.