It’s a funny thing, but these days we either get to the point incredibly quickly or incredibly slowly, if ever. So a 90-second film trailer will now start with a 10-second trailer, for instance. A trailer for a trailer, it’s insane. But equally any article you read will bury the lead as far down the text as it possibly can, just so you have to scroll past ads.

This week I made a video where I don’t know for sure that I got the timing right or wrong, but I know I spent more time thinking about than I should. I am very pleased with it because it’s a nice gag: I made an unboxing video where the joke was that I discard the product and instead go into crazed detail about the box. I think the fun is in how an expensive product is dismissed with a wave and in how I really researched the manufacture of cardboard boxes so I could talk with the kind of obsession that you see in regular unboxing videos.

(This just occurred me. Alan Plater once wrote a trilogy of television dramas called “To See How Far It Is”, and they were set in a cardboard box factory. A recurring line was something like “there’s more in boxes than you think.” Now I think he’d be proud.)

Anyway.

One question is how long you run the joke for and of course the answer is not long. I think it’s a two-minute video. But another question is how long do you take before you drop the hammer: the video has to look real before you reveal that it isn’t, and the amount of time you spend appearing to do a genuine unboxing is obviously crucial. And I do think I got this wrong: it takes 39 seconds before you twig.

Yet part of this is as much about when you are being obvious and when you are not: from 39 seconds on it is entirely obvious that this is a gag, and for up to 38 seconds I think it appears obvious that it’s a real unboxing video.

And I’ve also been thinking about this for days, though, because I watched John Sullivan’s 1980s BBC sitcom, “Dear John”, plus as its NBC remake in the States. The pilot episode of both versions has the same first big joke and it is incredibly obvious, so much so that you can see it coming right now, this moment, without knowing a thing about it. When you’re watching, there’s no question, I think, that you get the joke, that you fully expect the joke, that in fact what’s meant to be the first big laugh is practically pathetically obvious.

But that first big laugh turns out to not be the first big laugh at all, it is a setup for the real first big laugh that follows later.

Very briefly — so very briefly that you’ll get it, of course, but also what comedy there is will be erased — “Dear John” is about a recent divorcee joining a help group that meets in a local adult education centre. It’s one of many adult education sessions being run there and Sullivan makes it very obvious that John has at first joined the wrong group. He’s joined the Alcoholics Anonymous one.

We get that gag, then John crosses the corridor to the correct group, we get to meet some more characters in this “1-2-1 Group” and then one of them is asked to introduce himself. “My name is Clive,” he starts, “and I am an alcoholic.”

In retrospect, it is stunningly obvious that this would be the gag, but it comes as a genuine surprise. And then Clive leaves to join the AA group — and five other people follow with him. It’s a delicious and funny moment, especially when you of course immediately realise all of the really clear setups that should have told you it was coming.

Yet it seems such a gamble. I shouldn’t give you the impression, if you haven’t seen these two shows, that there isn’t anything funny before this point, but there isn’t much and in the UK version especially, there’s some bleak moments too. In the UK version, the joke about being in the wrong group comes 7’36” into the episode, and then Clive the alcoholic starts at 13’34”.

In the US remake, which you can watch on YouTube right here, the wrong group gag comes 4’02” into the episode. And then Frank the alcoholic — renamed for the US version, presumably because Clive is just too British — does his bit at 9’27”.

I do think it’s interesting that the US version is so much faster getting to these points than the UK one and actually I think it’s impressive. There are points that feel rushed, but there are also versions of the gag from the UK one that are paced better in the US version.

But either way, “Dear John” risked holding back its big laugh for between 4 and 8 minutes. And that joke is so obvious that you think the whole show is going to be that predictable. Yet they then wait a further five or six whole minutes before the real punchline.

It’s amazingly brave, I think. I mean, I know both shows were back in the 1980s and everything is faster now, but still I worried about keeping you waiting for the gag for 39 seconds.

Mind you, I’ve also kept you waiting from the first paragraph on to see what the real point of this is and now you’ve read the lot, I’ve got nothing. I feel this is letting you down — exactly the way those lead-burying articles always do.