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 no avoiding war; it can only be postponed to the advantage of others.”
—Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527)
“At least the Pilgrim Fathers used to shoot Indians: the Pilgrim Children merely punch time clocks.”
—E.E. (Edward Estlin)
“For as the interposition of a rivulet, however small, will occasion the line of the phalanx to fluctuate, so any trifling disagreement will be the cause of seditions; but they will not so soon flow from anything else as from the disagreement between virtue and vice, and next to that between poverty and riches.”
—Aristotle (384–322 B.C.)