Punchlines! Punchlines! Punchlines!

It’s called a punchline for a reason. It hits you hard and quickly and sometimes catches you off guard. A good one, just like a punch in real life, will leave you in stitches. The punchline has a sidekick that it never leaves home without. His (or her) name is “setup”. Without the setup, the punchline’s powers remain useless and dormant.

This is the formula my friends. There is no way around it and it is the most common mistake I see when I teach stand up and roasting. Setup and punchline go hand in hand like pen and paper or wine and cheese. Lob the ball up (setup) and smack it down (punchline). It’s just that easy….or is it?

Let me just say this right off the bat……NO ONE WANTS TO HEAR YOUR STORY! I argue with my clients about this daily. Stories are not jokes. Stories are for campfires and family reunions and have no place on the stage. “But Bert Kreischer tells stories.” He sure does. He also takes his shirt off . Who cares? And for the record, I don’t think Bert Kreischer is funny AT ALL but it works for him.

Here’s the point: you are not Bert Kreischer, it won’t work for you, and you have a limited amount of time that we need to maximize. Traditional jokes using the setup and punchline technique will help you focus on LPM’s (laughs per minute). The higher the better. Keep the audience engaged with nonstop laughter and you will win over and over again. With that said, here are some of the reasons why setup and punchline works every time and is what you should be working towards achieving during the writing process. Keep in mind these points work for stand up material as well as roast material alike.

First off is time. In a roast, you only have 5 minutes to pack as much funny into your performance as possible. Even in stand up, a lot of the time, you only get five minutes. Open mics, guest spots, and some feature spots are only 5 minutes long so there’s no time to waste. Stories take so much time to tell with people adding details that don’t matter. Here’s the worst part, it’s usually an inside joke and is only “special” to you and possibly the people that were there. Think of the last time someone told you a personally story where you did anything more than just smile or slightly chuckle. Or think about another time when someone wanted to tell you something funny and just dragged on and on without going anywhere. Now imagine that’s your audience. Trust me, you don’t want that. A lot of the time when a comic is telling what you think is a “story” it is really just a well orchestrated collection of setups and punchlines that he or she has written and combined sometimes over the course of years.

The next thing that makes the traditional setup/punchline combo work is its concision. Don’t make your audience have to do work by following your long convoluted joke. The key to the laugh is the punchline. Get there. Anything you say before that is only there to make the punchline work. The audience should not have to follow along with a pen, paper, and an abacus just to keep up with the joke. Aim for two lines, maybe three with the third being the punch and move on. Trim the fat. If your not done with the joke topic as a whole then each additional line should be in the same formula: setup/punch or setup/punch/tags (tags are for a different lesson). It will appear as one joke but it will in fact be comprised of many jokes.

Punchlines should be a clear indication to your audience of when the joke has apexed and when it is time to laugh. It’s called a punch line because it hits hard. You must use your voice as a tool here. Let them know this is the moment that they have been waiting for. If it’s not clear or you don’t “smack it down” you will not get the laugh you probably could have if it was properly executed. The key here is YOU must know where you want the joke to end up because if you don’t, your audience definitely won’t. And practice using the correct words in the correct order because one misuse can flatten your joke. This needs to be done with a surgeon’s precision.

Lastly I want to point out another common mistake I see when my clients are writing jokes and working on their punchlines. “Know what I’m saying,” and “am I right,” are not punchlines. Because, no we don’t and no you’re not. It’s your job to tell the audience what it is you’re saying. It’s not some game for them to figure out. Don’t make them do work. They are there to relax and enjoy the show. Lead them into your thought with the setup and leave them laughing with the punch. Boom!

This is the meat and potatoes of it my friends. It is not easy and if it was, I’d be out of a job and the line to the open mic would be three cities long. So take time and write. Get a clear setup and with a clear punchline and then go out and see how it feels to say it into a microphone. If people don’t get it, change it. Then change it again and again and again until your audience falls over in laughter. If you’re not willing to do that then have a seat and make room for someone who is.