Mastering Stand-Up by Stephen Rosenfield

Author:Stephen Rosenfield
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2017-03-16T04:00:00+00:00

Setup: I couldn’t believe it: the moment I walk into the room her father starts pointing at me and yelling, “I know you! I know you! You mugged me! You mugged me!”

Punchline: I can’t believe (slight pause) he remembered that.

In summation, here are the attributes of a good setup:

It is concise

It is clear about its single subject

It is clear about your attitude toward the subject

It leads directly to a punchline

It protects the surprise of the punchline

Now let’s examine the punchline.

The punchline is what triggers the laugh. Usually in stand-up it’s expressed in words. But it can also be a facial expression, or a piece of physical comedy, or a sound effect. The word punchline is advice to you from your foremothers and forefathers in comedy. It’s instructing you to punch the laugh line, to emphasize it vocally, to make it clear to the audience when they’re expected to laugh.

A punchline needs to be short. The second the audience gets the joke, they want to laugh. If your punchline continues after the audience gets the joke, you’re stepping on your laugh and you may kill it. It’s easy to rectify this situation. End the punchline where the audience laughs. So, for example, the original punchline of Kate Redway’s joke about not going to church because “all they read is the Bible” was “I already read that. Can’t they read something else, for Chrissake?!” (See here.) After the audience showed us by their laughter exactly where the laugh was, we cut the second sentence.

A punchline usually needs to be a surprise. Often this surprise is created by an unexpected shift in attitude from the setup to the punchline. A good example is arguably the best-known punchline in American history: Henny Youngman’s “Take my wife—please.” He usually performed it as a one-liner, but it worked best when he added a short setup. I saw him perform the joke in the ’60s, a time when the role of women in society was changing dramatically. More women were going to college and graduate school and getting full-time jobs and building careers, and fewer women were staying home to be full-time wives and moms. Here’s how Henny delivered the joke:

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