The Choi-Williams distribution is applied to the time-frequency analysis of signals describing rapid magnetohydrodynamic modes and events in tokamak plasmas. Its effectiveness is demonstrated through a comparison with the spectrogram, which requires a compromise between time and frequency resolution, and with the Wigner distribution, which can give an unclear representation of the modes, masked by inconvenient artefacts. Examples of phenomena in the JET tokamak are shown, namely the onset of neoclassical tearing modes in discharges with ion cyclotron resonant heating, precursors of edge localized modes, and washboard modes.