Zitat des Tages über Pointe / Punch Line:
Never go for the punch line. There might be something funnier on the way.
My mother is very funny. She is from a village; she has a typical village kind of humour. Often she says a lot of things she herself isn't aware is a punch line.
I always told everybody the perfect joke would be where the setup and punch line were identical.
On stage you look much larger than you are. You can have subtle changes of timing; how you place a punch line in a joke or movement or emotion according to an audience.
I don't really know what is shocking. When you tell the story of a man who is beheaded, you have to show how they cut off his head. If you don't, it's like telling a dirty joke and leaving out the punch line.
My works were not - and they still aren't - single panel gags with a punch line underneath them. I like a lot of those cartoons; I just don't draw them.
I realized that comedians of the day were operating on jokes and punch lines. The moment you say the punch line, the audience either laughs sincerely or they laugh automatically or they don't laugh. The thing that bothered me was that automatic laugh. I said, that's not real laughter.
One must remember that in the '70s, Democrats still grasping for Camelot were desperately pinning their hopes on Teddy while Republicans were doing everything they could politically to turn him into a punch line post-Chappaquiddick. And the idea of Ted Kennedy - rather than the actual man - dominated his political legacy through the early '90s.
Cigarettes are an instant signifier in culture. It punctuates a joke, or puts that extra zing on a punch line. I like them as a prop. I think it can be really useful for character and texture and contrast and all of that.
I'm kind of a nerd. A square. And I'm terrible at telling jokes. I always forget the punch line.
My father who in this case was an obsessive life-long storyteller, and by a very peculiar trick of my father's. My father would tell a very, very long story, and the punch line would be in Yiddish.
When a kid can understand that a word can mean two things, there's some real thinking going on. They have a vested interest in finding out what a word means, because it's the punch line to a joke.
My greatest fear is that the audience will beat me to the punch line.
I often speak publicly, and when I do, I also get to listen to other presenters. The most memorable are the ones that hit an emotional chord with a tight story and a punch line. No fluff. Keep it creative and concise. Greatness exists in quality, not quantity.