So punch lines, and you punch lines. These are the most important parts of jokes. This is where the money is made. This is where people really become famous. This is the secret sauce. Anybody can write setups you can sit down, you can write setups all day.

Some are better than others, but punch lines, buddy. That's what, that's what it's about. That's what it's about in comedy. So the question is this, is it magic? Or is it just a dumb formula? Can it be taught?

Well, it can and it can, I can give you some levers and buttons to push, and we'll follow through with it right here. Alright, so punch lines and you let's jump in punch lines, do a few things you guys should understand this. punchlines do a few different things. They answer the implied or explicit inherent question of the setup. So remember, we went over that? The idea is that you have the audience hanging on to a question what is what is inherently or explicitly placed or implied in the setup and what you're doing is answering that question.

Oh, it's awesome that slurpees are invented today. Well, okay, well, how awesome is it? They want to know that they want you to go answer that question for them in your punch line. And that becomes the punchline of the joke. They also reframe or recontextualize, something that we already thought we knew. So, you know, the Slurpee example is a good one.

It's pretty great. You know, slurpees are pretty good. You have a Slurpee you like slurpees, you've had them before in your life, but you've never thought about them as the greatest technology in the history of mankind. And your opportunity is to reframe or recontextualize something you already thought we knew. This is part of the reason why comedy has taken over news. And comedy new shows are so popular is because they can recontextualize information we already thought we knew and explain it in a very humorous way.

It's a natural way to do it. And the revelation of that information is actually the punchline. They also make us laugh when we write when we write them if they're good. So as you You're writing jokes as you're writing punch lines. If you laugh out loud, it's a pretty good sign that you've got a good punch line. Sometimes punch lines don't seem funny when you write them, but you try them out on stage.

And then suddenly the audience thinks they're funny. I wrote one about tall people A while ago, where I said, two tall people were speaking to each other like to lanky, Great Danes. And I didn't find that terribly funny when I wrote it. I guess I find it kind of funny. Now. Anyway, you should be laughing out loud, you don't have to, but if you do, it's a sign that you've got a pretty good punch line.

Also, they cause an emotional reaction in the audience. So don't, don't try not to go with shock humor or what we call blue humor, which is humor that's overtly sexual or disgusting. But this is actually what they do. And that's part of the reason that people laugh and there's a theory that laughter is a surprise effect that comes from the thought that something dangerous might have happened, but instead something pleasant happened. Think about peekaboo with the child. The child hides.

You know, the mother hides their her her face. And she's like, Where did I go and the child's afraid her mother disappeared, and then suddenly, oh, I'm right here. So it's just your mom and then the child laughs. It could be something scary, but it turned out to be something pleasant. So, shock humor is a way that some comedians do this blue humor is a way that some comedians do this. And some comedians like to do that.

And some audiences also like it, but intentionally moving into that space intentionally moving into that shock or blue humor is not a great way to, to move into comedy originally. So you're going to be building up to a five minute routine here. I would encourage you to not have shocking or blue jokes in your routine I would if you need to write them if you're doing a free writing. If you're if they're coming to mind, go ahead and write them. Don't censor yourself, but also Ultimately, when we go through editing will probably cut a lot of that out. Also, they punch the audience in the effing face.

So humor should be funny. It should also be in your face a little bit. It shouldn't be passive, it should be active, it should be going into the audience, it should be making the audience have feelings, it should be making them do things, it should be causing thoughts. You're actually messing with the brains of your audience when you're when you're doing good comedy. So it should actually do that it should actually punch the audience in the face. But above all else, they make the audience laugh.

Punch lines, make the audience laugh. If they don't make the audience laugh, they weren't really a very good punch line. So there are two types of punch lines. Okay, here's what you need to understand. There are a couple different types of punch lines. Funny, not funny.

You probably wrote a bunch of that funny loser. No, I'm just kidding. There are different types of punch lines. And here they are. We've got I've got a few of them. This isn't all of them.

This is a few of them. I want to explain. There's a bunch here that you can use To go through your setups, and if you're if you're at a loss for how to take the joke, you can just refer to one of these and then try it out. Just try a few of these different levers or callbacks, we're going to go through all of them. So this video is probably gonna be like 20 minutes long. I could cut it up into different parts.

But you know what? Let's just do it in one long haul. What do you say, Okay, let's jump in Future Past. So this is simple, describing a projection into the past or the future, with details that draw attention to the absurdity, juxtaposition or injustice and the original premise. So at its core, what you're doing with any setup and with any punchline is drawing more attention to a contrast to a juxtaposition to two things that are next to each other that that seem like there's some kind of irreconcilable difference between the two. And the more you highlight that difference, the funnier it becomes.

So future and past is a way to do this. If you project something into the future, you can talk about how in the future we will be viewing the present or how we view the past and the light of the present, or any of these kinds of things. Here's an example joke that I wrote You can't change the past, it's already happened. For example, I used to be a goth in high school. I can't get in a DeLorean and Back to the Future that out of the school yearbook. So I wrote this a while ago, I actually did used to be a goth in high school.

But the idea is that it was at the time and there are a few inherent assumptions in this job, but the audience normally gets it, that at the time, I thought being a goth was pretty cool. And I actually have another joke about that, right after this. I say I thought I would, I once wore a spiked Joker to my French to class because I thought I was trade badass. But turns out I was tre a douchebag. And that just outlines that assumption, which is that I thought I was cool. But now I know it's not cool.

And unfortunately, I can't change that it's already happened. It's in the past, so I can't get in a DeLorean which is of course, a reference to the time machine and Back to the Future. All of that stuff is just just language in this joke, but the basic setup is you can't change the past it's already happened. the punch line is I used to be a goblin High School I can't do anything about it now, no matter how bad I try, so it's a future past joke I'm sure I would encourage you to go check out how to write a couple of these using the setups you've developed. Finally, also puns. puns.

You could also call these dad jokes they're using the actual sounds of the words and the logic that comes with the actual words to add additional absurdity or play with the concepts. If you're listening to this class and course and you live in the UK or you live in Europe, or potentially you live in Asia even a little bit especially East Asia, this this is actually a really people in your area. Love this, especially in in the UK puns are a big time thing I went to do the Edinburgh Fringe Festival a couple years ago. People love these. Why did the electron leave the atom? Because it had its eye on something else.

Oh What a funny joke. So here we know electrons are articles and atoms. And an ion is what happens when an atom loses or gains an electron. So, if you didn't know those things, don't worry about it. That's why puns fall apart. And they're, they're bad jokes.

Mostly. They're mostly bad jokes, but there's still jokes and people sometimes laugh at how dumb or absurd they are. And that's fine. Get a laugh Anyway, you can actually in a strange way, when you do a lot of comedy, you start appreciating bad jokes almost as much as as good jokes. Let us continue. Act outs.

So act outs are one. You see a lot of new comedians doing this act outs are when the actual comedian becomes a character and a tiny one person scene. Or maybe they they play two different people talking to each other. Eddie Izzard does a lot of this. He's very Very good at it. It's, it's a fallback for a lot of new comics who either come from an acting background or potentially an improv background.

I would ask you to shy away from this. I think that you There was a time and place for you to write this. You should write it if it's coming to mind, you should absolutely do it. But if you find yourself going to it a lot, try to write handfuls of different other types of jokes. And you know, you're going to be writing 10 punch lines per joke. So you have a lot of opportunity to write not act outs, but act outs, typically can be are pretty funny, and when they get a laugh, they normally can get your largest laugh.

This is one of the jokes that I have in my act. How to Germans even tell jokes. Can you imagine a German person telling Why did the chicken cross the road zone that is a follow on he is attempting to traverse the autobahn. So that gets huge laughs in front of audiences. You might not have laughed, listening to this. But audiences really liked that joke and it's because it's ridiculous.

A German person using the wrong words, attempting to describe this chicken crossing the road joke. Obviously, it's a joke we all know inherently in the English language, Why did the chicken cross the road to get to the other side. So there's a foul, and he's attempting to traverse the autobahn, but I'm using a German accent to do it. All of that compounds on itself. And in there's many different levels or layers of humor. So act outs can be very powerful.

But for Nova stand up comics, they tend to rely on act outs rather than trying to actually figure out the language of a joke, and act out so you can see this here. I could not do an accent, and I could still tell this joke, and it would probably still get laughs It's just that the accent and the character helps sell it. So think about writing some of these don't write too many of them. Let's move on. comparisons. comparisons are very popular in comedy, and you're going to start seeing these a lot, especially if you go watch a lot of stand up.

Comedy on Netflix or on YouTube. People use comparisons all the time. Again, any type of comedy is just highlighting the contrast between two things. So using analogies or phrases like that's like or it's just like to highlight the contrast or absurdity in the situation or comparing it with another situation that's similar is a great way to do this. It's a great way to highlight the juxtaposition. This is a joke I wrote a while ago with prostate cancer.

Most doctors follow a wait and watch strategy. That's like coming home and finding a strange man in your house and just waiting to see what he does. It's so insane because it's like you can see the strangeness here if you have a polyp on your prostate as a man, and your doctor says, Hey, just wait for it. You would never come home and find some strange person living in your house and being like, well, I'll just go to sleep and see what happens. You would never do that. So the comparison immediately draws the ridiculousness to the original situation.

I would encourage you to look at how to write lots of these things. They're very good. Lists are always very popular in comedy, I would always say, do three either do one or do three, don't do more than three, don't do two. You can if you're going to do two, I mean, a comparison is essentially a two item list. But if you're going to do too, you might as well do three, especially if you're just listing them off a comparison is describing two situations by analogy lists or just listing three things or listing one thing sometimes people do five but there's this rule in comedy called the rule of threes. And it means that all things in comedy come in threes.

If you're going to do something, do it three times. So here's a here's a joke that I wrote earlier. You guys were here for the US should open a Slurpee stand in the lunchroom each country would get to serve its own Germany would be the bratwurst flavor. French would be Kevin bear and India would be curry. So those are obviously all awful flavors. For for a Slurpee.

I think a further punch line to this joke would be Suddenly all of the tropical third world countries, we become very popular, because they're the ones that have the best fruit. Of course, I mean, nobody wants a curry flavored Slurpee. Anyway, you get the idea. These lists are a great way to provide fodder for punch lines. You can see the setup, the UN should open a Slurpee stand lunchroom every country will get to serve its own. That opens the door immediately to what countries would do what and this is just a list of those three things.

Moving on callbacks. So callbacks are powerful. These are a special kind of punch line that calls up humor from earlier in the routine, and then repeats it again later. Even. Not that funny jokes can get powerful callbacks. Chris Rock is a master of this, I would encourage you to watch bigger and blacker because there is an amazing callback later in the show.

I'm not going to reveal it for you here. But you will notice that when you watch it and you can see that this is a great way to generate lots of heat. And really make the audience feel like you're a virtual. So they're like, how did he or she do that? How did the comedian do that? callback here that I've written?

Let's check it out. Don't trust atoms, they make up everything. Remember, remember a while ago when I talked about atoms, here they are, they're back. That's a callback. You can only really write callbacks. You can't write them you but you can find them is what I was told by Gilda Howser, the original woman who taught me how to do stand up comedy.

You cannot write a callback, you can find a callback. And we will talk about that when we're arranging our material later comes up in the editing and rehearsal process. Moving along hundred and 80 degree turn. This is when you suddenly do the opposite of what you were doing before and immediately highlights the contrast. Basically by pushing it directly by explicitly stating that it was 180 degree turn, Aziz Ansari released a new comedy special just recently this week in July of 2019. I think it's called right now.

That special He has a lot of 180 degree turns in it, it's great. It is a great way to throw in front of the audience something that is absurd. And you want to point out the absurdity of here's the example I have. And then Barack Obama got elected and 100 years of peace and prosperity reigned over America, psych. That didn't happen. We elected Trump and everything fell apart.

So you can get a laugh out of this because people can see not only is there some absurdity, because 100 years of peace and prosperity did not reign over American they can already see it. But the hundred and 80 degree flip is me talking about how awful things are now that Trump got elected. Now, I don't know what your politics are. But just leave that to the side for a moment and appreciate how this is 180 degree flip on this joke and it was in real life. It was terrifying. If you want your money back over that, go ahead.

I don't. I'm alright with that. Moving along, exaggeration, this comes in three varieties and I'm gonna explain all three of them because they're a slightly nuanced and it's worth understanding. There's the double down The reductio ad absurdum and the overinflation so when we move into the double down what we see is, Oh, did I say he was odd? Because I meant to say he was the weirdest person who had lived ever. So what you're doing is you're saying one thing that's a little bit and then you're doubling down on it right in front of somebody.

And there's lots of different ways to do this. I have some friends who talk about they're like, oh, man, yeah, I was so crazy. I smoked a bunch of weed and man, like, it was like, I was so wired for hours. And oh, wait a minute. Did I say I smoked weed? I meant to say I smoked meth.

That's a double down you taking one element of the punch line. And you're throwing another heavier layer on top of it. You're saying Oh, is that plus one because it's actually plus 10. And the audience can feel it. They cause an emotional reaction. It's very funny.

I said this this part Did I say who was odd I meant to say he was the weirdest person who had ever lived ever was something that I said during a routine About a roommate of mine who was a very strange person. Super strange, very weird guy. Let's move along the next type of exaggeration is the reductio ad absurdum. This one comes from the world of philosophy. And what you're doing is you're taking one logical component of, of the setup or a statement, and you're exaggerating it to the point where you're reducing the concept beyond a breaking point. So many philosophers use this to find faults and flaws and other people's thinking and logic.

You'll use this on stage to an absurd degree to a cause humor. So here's one I saw this is not my joke. This is another joke from a friend named Alex. He's very funny. I saw a sign that said Obama raise taxes Hitler raise taxes, Obama equals Hitler part of me, but I didn't know that there were people who thought the height of Hitler's crimes was raising taxes. That's I love this joke.

This joke is so funny. Because obviously, obviously, the height of Hitler's crimes was not raising taxes, like nobody's looking up in the history book and saying, oh, wait a minute, hold on a second, this Hitler guy, and he goes further in this joke. He's like this Hitler guy. He's pretty bad. Did you know that he raised taxes over 8%? Like, it's so it's so completely ridiculous that someone would make a comparison between Obama and Hitler, because there is no comparison.

So we're reducing the logic of that argument to its breaking point, which is that there isn't anybody who believes that the height of Hitler's crimes is raising taxes, which is what the comparison from Obama takes place must obviously be an idiot. So that's, that's where this joke is coming from. That's reductio ad absurdum. Think about this, especially if you have setups that are causing a logical case that you're not trying to make but you're observing in the world. This is great for observational humor. There's a lot of things that Jerry Seinfeld does that are this similar type of situation.

If you're making a case, I don't tend to use a lot of these because I make it I make the case, I'm the, the change agent in the stand up routine. But if you're more of an observational person, this is a really good productive way to write a lot of jokes. Finally, let's talk about over inflation. So over inflation, you could also call it hyperbole. It's a little bit different than doubling down it's not reductio ad absurdum. It's basically pushing more energy into something and in and building it up even larger to an absurd degree.

So let's look into this. The average whale has a brain five to seven times larger than the average human. So you know that paper you wrote about old man in the sea. A whale wrote a paper that when he was wrote that paper when he was three, and it was a hit song, so we know whale saying, we know whales have brains five to seven times larger than humans. Look it up. It's true.

And you wrote a paper probably one day about old man in the sea because everybody in america on high school does that well that whale was so smart that he wrote that paper when he was three. And it wasn't just a paper it was a hit song. That's the overinflation. So when I'm making cases for things on stage, I tend to use this one a lot. It's it's, it's a, it's just pushing more into something than would be there. So obviously, whales don't write papers.

They do sing songs, which is why that that logic of the joke kind of works. And it's maybe a little bit of a pun in there. But the overinflation is that there's, there's no way a whale would do this. So I would encourage you to check this out as well for for a lot of different types of jokes that you're writing. Again, you're gonna have a lot of punch lines, so doubling down reductio ad absurdum overinflation are great sources, and you can use all of them on just about every joke that you're writing. Finally, understatement.

Understatement is a little bit like exaggeration, except it's drawing attention to a difference by deliberately underplaying it by deliberately under-reacting To the emotional content of the premise or the setup, so it's, you know, if you live on the continent of Europe if you're a French speaker who's listening to this, the French for some reason do not understand this kind of sarcasm the English very much understand it. This is something you probably do in your daily life if you're British, but the French don't understand it at all. For some reason, I'm not sure if the broader European continent gets it and I'm not sure if Asian or African continents get it but understatement is something where you go like, Oh, that's great when it's very much not great. Let's see the example here. My girlfriend and I have an open relationship, which is cool. I thought I was coming out on top when we made that deal, but it turns out her on bottom a bunch of times.

This is a joke that I do in my act. I'll probably do it next week. When I'm doing featuring and it basically is the understatement is cool. understatement is Yeah, that's cool. And why is it cool because I thought I was Coming on top when I made that deal, but it turns out it was her on bottom a bunch of times, meaning she's having a lot more sex than I am. And I'm dealing with a little bit of the language.

So there's some pun in here too. I thought I was coming out on top. But she was coming on bottom a bunch of times. So because you can be on top or on bottom when you're having sex, that's the joke. But the understatement sets that up properly because the emotional content of that second and third sentence of the joke, I thought I was coming out on top turns on her on bottom a bunch of times. That's something that I could say that's stupid.

It was stupid of me. Or I could say like I did in this and understatement, which is cool. Now the audience is almost hooked into why was that cool? it it's just a different way of approaching this but you can you can say, you know, if you're just to use another Trump thing here, if Trump got elected, which was awesome. It's using sarcasm to pull this The audience into a specific type of emotional space where something can be explored. So that's a good way to do it is to understate in order to draw attention to the difference, but all together above all else, puns, punch lines, exaggeration, punchlines, anything they make the audience laugh.

So even if you don't have, even if it's not a category that I've written about, even if it's not something that even makes sense to you, but you laugh at it, and the audience laughs at it, then it's a punchline, you should go ahead and do it. People have tried to, to figure out how comedians do what they do. And a lot of people sometimes are, it's a mystery like Zach Galifianakis. Eddie Izzard, sometimes they're not really sure exactly why the audience is laughing or you when you're watching them, but you know what, they just make them laugh. So that's, that's the the best. And I would encourage you to just go ahead and and explore as much as possible what is possible with all kinds of punch lines.

And if it makes the audience laugh, it's a good punch line. Thanks so much. This has been 25 minutes, so I'm glad you're still holding on.