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The HBS hosts discuss timing, prudence, discretion, and propriety.

When we talk about propriety, there are a lot of \u201cgray\u201d areas, largely because propriety demands that we conform to conventional rules of speech or behavior\u2026 and \u201cconventional rules\u201d are often more the product of \u201cconvention\u201d than they are actual \u201crules.\u201d Propriety requires that we develop prudence and discretion, our capacities of judgment, sagacity, and interpersonal awareness, which are arguably quite different from our capacity to apply a rule or logically reason from premise to conclusion.

Comics (perhaps the least interested in \u201cpropriety\u201d among us)\xa0 call this \u201ctiming,\u201d and they spend years perfecting optimal joke delivery. When their timing fails, or when they can\u2019t \u201cread the room,\u201d they bomb. Sometimes that\u2019s the consequence of a deficit in their delivery\u2013 their\xa0 rhythm, cadence, tempo, or pausing\u2013 but sometimes the joke itself fails. For example, in the months immediately following 9/11, most comics who joked about the attacks of that day were met with gasps and groans from their audience. "Too soon," the audience would heckle with the bad taste of \u201cbad taste\u201d in their mouths, too soon.

Today we\u2019re going to try to unpack what \u201ctoo soon\u201d means, how we determine how soon is \u201ctoo soon,\u201d and whether or not there are, in fact, some \u201crules\u201d of propriety.

Full episode notes available at this link:
https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-104-too-soon

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