Avoiding The Punch Line
Not all jokes have a punchline in a classic sense. Some comedic sketches simply end abruptly, or fade to black without a conclusion. Shaggy dog stories are long-winded anti-jokes where the punchline is deliberately anticlimactic, and are not intended to elicit laughter. Slapstick humor often relies more on an action and comical reaction instead of an actual punchline, but a pie in the face or pratfall can still work as a comical conclusion to a premise.
Monty Python moved away from punch lines as they found it increasingly hard to find good ways of rounding up humorous sketches. Terry Gilliam's animations and The Lumberjack Song were two of the many methods used to conclude sketches without punch lines.
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Famous quotes containing the words punch line, avoiding the, avoiding, punch and/or line:
“I never had anybody but you ... not a real husband ... not even a man.... It’s a bad joke without a punch line.”
—Stanley Kubrick (b. 1928)
“The only sure way of avoiding these evils [vanity and boasting] is never to speak of yourself at all. But when, historically, you are obliged to mention yourself, take care not to drop one single word that can directly or indirectly be construed as fishing for applause.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“There is all the difference in the world between the criminal’s avoiding the public eye and the civil disobedient’s taking the law into his own hands in open defiance. This distinction between an open violation of the law, performed in public, and a clandestine one is so glaringly obvious that it can be neglected only by prejudice or ill will.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)
“Now you’re not gonna have a country that can make these kinds of rules work, if you haven’t got men that have learned to tell human rights from a punch in the nose.”
—Sidney Buchman (1902–1975)
“This wild night, gathering the washing as if it were flowers
animal vines twisting over the line and
slapping my face lightly, soundless merriment
in the gesticulations of shirtsleeves ...”
—Denise Levertov (b. 1923)