WARNING: THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR A RECENT (JUNE 2024) EPISODE OF DOCTOR WHO. I include another warning, though, before you get to the spoilers bit.

Years ago – I don’t remember exactly when or where – I learned a principle of comedy called “crossing the chasm”. It’s a powerful notion that has broad applicability to other forms of art, especially writing. What’s key here is that it’s a leap of faith the performer and the audience perform together.

It’s difficult…and dangerous…and absolutely essential to telling a great story.

Crossing the chasm

So what does “crossing the chasm” mean?

Imagine you’re asked to leap over a deep chasm. Cross it and you survive. Fall in and you die. Now, how wide should the chasm be? You probably want it to be tiny. Two inches wide at most. “I don’t want to fall into the Chasm of Death™!” you cry.

Now…picture this…your story’s main character faces the Chasm of Death™. Now how wide should it be?

You know intuitively that a two-inch wide Chasm of Death™ is no obstacle at all, and that facing such a chasm would bore your audience.

So how wide should the chasm be?

The answer is: as wide as possible, so long as your hero makes it across. Not wide enough equals boring. Too wide equals unbelievable (or, um, dead protagonist).

Crossing the comedy chasm

As I mentioned, this principle comes from – or at least I first heard it in – the world of comedy.

When we were kids, we could tell each other fart jokes, or use really simple puns (“Orange you glad I didn’t say banana again?!”) to get a laugh. As we get older, all the low-hanging fruit (see what I did there?) of easy laughs gets overused, and we usually need something subtler, cleverer, more sophisticated than fart noises if we want to hear the laughter.

And an important way that we can earn that laugh is by enticing the audience to think, to draw inferences. Consider the following joke, told three ways:

Joke, version 1

Mayor Blowfellow is so dumb. He promised to clean up this town, so I convinced him to pay for my dry cleaning.

Joke, version 2

Mayor Blowfellow is so dumb. He promised to clean up this town. Now, “clean up this town” doesn’t usually refer to actually making things clean, but I managed to convince him to pay for my dry cleaning.

Joke, version 3

Mayor Blowfellow is so dumb. He promised to clean up this town, so I bought him a truck full of perchloroethylene and told him to have at it.

Now, I’m no Jerry Seinfeld, but if you laughed at any version of the joke, I’d bet you laughed at version 1. And why? It’s not simply that I told it first. Rather, it goes to the core of what “crossing the chasm” means.

The chasm must be wide…but not too wide

The core of this comedy rule is this:

The further the audience has to leap – and still successfully cross the chasm – the funnier the joke will be.

What makes version 1 of the joke above innately funnier is that it requires the audience to draw the connections – to make the leap. If they cross it successfully, they’ll reward me with a laugh. If they cross it too easily it’s lame and obvious. Like our main character leaping a two-inch wide chasm, it carries no dramatic punch. That’s how the over-explained version 2 reads to me.

On the other hand, if they can’t make the connection – if they don’t cross at all – that’s not funny either. Version 3 relies on the audience understanding that perchloroethylene is the key chemical used in dry cleaning. Then they have to connect dry cleaning to “clean up this town”. That version of the joke is probably too abstruse to be funny. I’m asking them to cross too wide a chasm.

Bizarrely, though, for the .001% of people who do cross that chasm, the joke will be hilarious.

What’s happening here is that the audience not only gets the joke, but they get the satisfaction of proving how smart they are, even if just subconsciously. That satisfaction – that small jolt of dopamine (he said as if he had any real idea what that even means) – adds to the audience’s sense that they’re “in on it”…that they have the privilege of getting what others miss.

The chasm in storytelling

What works in comedy is equally useful in storytelling.

Humans are actually very good at making inferences, and as a whole we don’t like to be spoon-fed. Good storytellers perform this “crossing the chasm” routine all the time. Bad ones cross two-inch fractures, then let you know that crossing it was a VERY BIG DEAL.

Trusting your audience, allowing them to pull together the threads and figure out what your story is about without actually telling them will elevate any tale. It’s highly related to the concept of “show don’t tell” – we make the most powerful arguments when we allow the audience to see and understand, rather than simply tell them what to think.

But here’s the tricky bit.

Like the joke I told above, it’s a balancing act. The further you force an audience to leap, the more satisfying they’ll find it if they leap successfully. If you ask them to leap too far…if they fall into the chasm…you risk losing them.

“Dot and Bubble”: the story of a chasm

DOCTOR WHO SPOILERS AHEAD.

This topic occurred to me after participating in an online discussion regarding this week’s episode of Doctor Who titled “Dot and Bubble“. I’ve already mentioned that I’m a big Star Trek fan, and I (sometimes) love Doctor Who just as much or more.

For me, the problem with a lot of Doctor Who (and Star Trek and a great deal besides for that matter) is delivery of the story’s theme or underlying message. It’s not the content of the messaging with which I have a problem, it’s the heavy-handedness. Yes, bad things are bad. We know this and saying so won’t change anybody’s mind.

What can change a mind is investing in a character and their plight and then seeing how the “bad thing” plays out in a way that forces the audience to consider it in a new light.

“Dot and Bubble” does this in a way that perfectly shows both the good and the bad of that leap of faith, of trusting the audience to cross the chasm.

Spoilers here: the plot in brief

Lindy lives in a world where everyone exists in their own – literal – media bubble. Her circle of friends floats around her in a way that entirely blots out the real world. She has become utterly dependent on the “dot and bubble” technology of her social media world to the point that she can’t walk or even pee without the tech telling her what to do.

Unfortunately, out in the real world there are monsters eating everyone, so she has to break out of her bubble if she’s going to survive. The Doctor (our hero) and his friend Ruby contact her and try to help.

By the end of the story, we realize that Lindy is actually a pretty awful person: entitled, spoiled, and ultimately craven.

Importantly:

• Lindy is a rich, white kid. Everyone we see around her is white.
• The Doctor is black.
• Ruby is white.

The Doctor ultimately fails to save Lindy and her friends. And he fails precisely because – while she loses the literal technology bubble – she won’t let go of her deeper, internal bubble. The one that tells her that the Doctor is the “other” that she can’t trust.

Who failed to leap the chasm? This guy!

I really loved this episode, and in the day following its release, I posted my own take and read and watched a slew of reviews. What was fascinating to me were the number of reviewers (myself included) who were certain they knew what the episode was about. Liking it or hating it, some said “well, it’s a really obvious allegory on the social media bubble”. Others said “it’s 100% about racism”. Another pointed out that it’s a parable about the dangers of AI. Still others said, “No, it’s about class privilege”…one of them even pointed out to me that the rich are literally being eaten in this episode.

Each of these takes is correct in its way. The writer, Russell T. Davies, doesn’t explicitly say within the episode that “this is a story about racism” or “this is a story about social media”. He leaves you to pick up the clues. To me, it felt a little more abstract: the story, to me, was about the danger of confining ourselves to a bubble defined by “people like me”.

And yet…

…Davies did indeed have a point to make…and the point was certainly about racism. He discusses this here.

The question he asks us is: will we notice that everyone in this community is white, and if not why didn’t we notice this? And yet – even though I saw this – myself and others came to rather different conclusions. (The story seen through my own bubble, you see.)

So did Davies try to have us leap a chasm that was too wide? Or not wide enough?

Clearly a lot of viewers walked away with the idea that they had made the leap. And right or wrong a lot of them thought that the leap was too easy: they arrived at what was “obviously” being said.

If you watch/hear/read a story and your reaction is “well, that was obvious and pandering” even if you’re wrong about the intent, then the writer probably lost you: as a member of the audience you feel unfulfilled. If you fail to make the leap, again you’re in danger of getting lost in a different way.

It’s so much easier and surer to state explicitly what your story is about. When you do so, however, you cheat the audience of the joy and satisfaction of making that leap themselves.

I think this was a smart and clever story precisely because Davies trusted the audience to leap the chasm. He gave each of us room to fill in the gaps. That different people did it in different ways, arriving at different conclusions, is simply in the nature of good art.

Leaping your own chasm

As a creator, you need to judge how much of a leap to demand from your audience.

How far should they leap? I’m afraid I can’t offer any easy answer. As the example of “Dot and Bubble” demonstrates, intuitive leaps are an inexact science. I like to think that I understand a fair bit about what makes a good story, about how the pieces are put together…and yet I came away with something different than the author intended. A lot of people did. I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing for Davies. What’s important is that his story spurred a flurry of discussion.

It made people think.

And as an author, I don’t think you can ask for much more than that.

Well, that and royalties.

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