We have reached the stage in the Democratic race when the best candidates have buffed their stump speeches to a shine like a chauffeur polishing the front grill on a Rolls Royce. Every rambling anecdote has been dropped, every hand gesture has been syncopated with the rhetoric, and every laugh line has been blessed with the right emphasis.

Stump speeches have frequently been compared to a standup comic’s act. But that isn’t quite right—in part, because the crowds at political gatherings tend to be sober. Audiences at comedy clubs also know they are laughing at monologues that have been performed many times before. But a true political talent (like Bill Clinton in 1992) can make voters feel like the candidate is telling them something fresh and different that flows from the heart.

A stump speech can easily be expanded to add a local nugget or to react to the latest Trumpian outrage. But truncating the speech to a few minutes can be as brutal as seeing a literary masterpiece reduced to a few lines on an inspirational greeting card. Personal anecdotes lose their setups and applause lines become stripped of their context.

All the leading Democrats (save for Joe Biden) got a forced course Sunday in truncated tropes in Cedar Rapids, as they addressed an audience of 1,500 Iowa activists who chose to spend a sunny pre-summer afternoon in a hotel ballroom listening to speeches. What they learned from the 19 candidates who spoke is that brevity is not always the soul of wit.

The oratorical challenges of Sunday’s statewide Iowa Democratic event would have daunted William Jennings Bryan, the famed Nebraska “boy orator,” who harangued his way into the 1896 Democratic presidential nomination with his legendary “Cross of Gold” speech. The ballroom at the Doubletree Hotel is short and wide, which meant that most Democrats saw the distant speakers on giant TV screens. The time limits were as rigorously enforced as at the Oscars, right down to the event organizers bringing up the music as speakers hit the five-minute mark.