monologist can vary his playing time at will by leaving out points
and gags here and there, as necessity demands, so the writer should
supply at least a full fifteen minutes of material in his manuscript.

"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