What Is A Rap Punchline

[Karon Howey]

Apunch line (also punch-line or punchline) concludes a joke; it is intended to make people laugh. It is the third and final part of the typical joke structure. It follows the introductory framing of the joke and the narrative which sets up for the punch line.

The origin of the term is unknown. Even though the comedic formula using the classic "set-up, premise, punch line" format was well-established in Vaudeville by the beginning of the 20th century, the actual term "punch line" is first documented in the 1910s; the Merriam-Webster dictionary pegs the first use in 1916.[1]

A linguistic interpretation of the mechanics of the punch line response is posited by Victor Raskin in his script-based semantic theory of humor. Humor is evoked when a trigger, contained in the punch line, causes the audience to abruptly shift its understanding of the story from the primary (or more obvious) interpretation to a secondary, opposing interpretation. "The punch line is the pivot on which the joke text turns as it signals the shift between the [semantic] scripts necessary to interpret [re-interpret] the joke text."[2] To produce the humor in the verbal joke, the two interpretations (i.e., scripts) need to be both compatible with the joke text and opposite or incompatible with each other.[3] Thomas R. Shultz, a psychologist, independently expands Raskin's linguistic theory to include "two stages of incongruity: perception and resolution". He explains that "incongruity alone is insufficient to account for the structure of humour. [...] Within this framework, humour appreciation is conceptualized as a biphasic sequence involving first the discovery of incongruity followed by a resolution of the incongruity."[4][5] Resolution generates laughter.

There are many folk theories of how people deliver punchlines, such as punchlines being louder and at a higher pitch than the speech preceding it, or a dramatic pause before the punchline is delivered.[6] In laboratory settings, however, none of these changes are employed at a statistically significant level in the production of humorous narratives.[6] Rather, the pitch and loudness of the punchline are comparable to those of the ending of any narrative, humorous or not.[6]

In order to better elucidate the structure and function of the punch line, it is useful to look at some joke forms that purposely remove or avoid the punch line in their narrative. Shaggy dog stories are long-winded anti-jokes in which the punch line is deliberately anticlimactic. The humor here lies in fooling the audience into expecting a typical joke with a punch line. Instead they listen and listen to nothing funny and end up themselves as the butt of the joke.

Another type of anti-joke is the nonsense joke, defined as having "a surprising or incongruous punch line", which provides either no resolution at all or only a partial, unsatisfactory resolution.[7] One example of this is the no soap radio punch line: "Two elephants were taking a bath. One said, 'Please pass the soap.' The other replied, 'No soap, radio.'" Here the anticipated resolution to the joke is absent and the audience becomes the butt of the joke.

A joke contains a single story with a single punch line at the end. In the analysis of longer humorous texts, an expanded model is needed to map the narratological structure. With this in mind, the general theory of verbal humor (GTVH) was expanded to include longer humorous texts together with jokes, using the GTVH narrative structure to categorize them. A new term "jab line" was introduced to designate humor within the body of a text, as opposed to the punch line, which is always placed at the end. The jab line is functionally identical to the punch line, except that it can be positioned anywhere within the text, not just at the end. "Jab and punch lines are semantically indistinguishable (...), but they differ at a narratological level."[8] Additionally, "jab lines are humorous elements fully integrated in the narrative in which they appear (i.e., they do not disrupt the flow of the narrative, because they either are indispensable to the development of the 'plot' or of the text, or they are not antagonistic to it)".[9]

Using the expanded narrative structure of the GTVH and this new terminology of jab lines, literature and humor researchers now have a single theoretical framework, with which they can analyze and map any kind of verbal humor, including novels, short stories, TV sitcoms, plays, movies as well as jokes.[10]

A Some men are about to be executed. The guard brings the first man forward, and the executioner asks if he has any last requests. He says no, and the executioner shouts, "Ready! Aim!" Suddenly the man yells, "Earthquake!" Everyone is startled and looks around. In all the confusion, the first man escapes.

According to this theory, the punchline is always the deviation, and it does not matter how many instances of A occur for there to be a punchline. However, jokes following the AAB structure are consistently rated as being funnier than their AB or AAAB counterparts.[11]

Literary critics have competing ideas about what so conspicuously unites the novels of Sheila Heti and Ben Lerner: are their novels knstlerroman, chronicling an artist's development?1 Or "novels of commission," novels about "wanting-to-write"?2 Self-help or how-to narratives?3 The fictional essay4 or essayistic fiction?5 A renewed sincerity (or "New Sincerity") in fiction?6 Or North American autofiction?7 And why are their shared categorizations both so widely noted and yet so hard to precisely and unanimously pin down?

The epigraphs to my essay are found halfway through both writers' first so-called knstlerroman. While both of these quotations support all the above categorizations that critics have given these novels, they also immediately demonstrate both writers' aesthetic strategy: their protagonist's self-narration rises in intensity and desperation until it lands on an outrageous and bathetic comic register of "self-immolation" and "shattered storefronts" and "shit." While scholarship on Lerner and Heti has been preoccupied with which subgeneric iteration of the novel these writers have together renovated, such scholarship rarely focuses on the formal qualities that link their novels: Sheila Heti and Ben Lerner both use punchlines to narrate their fictional selves' failures. As these brief examples show, both narrators resolve their embarrassing desperation to be appreciated as artists by having their reading audience laugh at their desperation and the ridiculous narrative turns it produces. The punchline, as a formal narrative feature, reframes their failure, moving a narrative predicament from seriousness to play. In the case of Heti's and Lerner's narrators, punchlines resolve personal failure through the formal recuperation of comic deflation.

What is presented as immaturity and absurdity by their narrators is, through the craft of Lerner and Heti, a meta-technique that aids a provocative resolution to the self-conscious dilemmas of their own aesthetic projects. Heti and Lerner blur the lines between their writerly and fictional selves, framing their lives and artistic failures through the deflating mechanics of punchlines in order to produce an aesthetic project that humorously, charmingly and ironically counteracts that aesthetic failure. Consequently, in a manner parallel to their narrators, these novelists frame their own failures to live up to social, artistic, and generic expectations as a means of also fulfilling them. By aestheticizing acts of artistic and social failure through deflation, these novelists provocatively challenge aesthetic and social norms, questioning what "art" and "artists" are assumed to be. Yet, this strategy also risks reinforcing the very social, artistic, and generic expectations these novels joke about, as well as the classed and racialized assumptions that undergird them. In other words, by employing narrators who comically perform their failure to be read by "everyone," to "save the world," Heti and Lerner risk reinforcing a distinctly racially- and class-coded fantasy: one's art is legitimate when it is recognized as socially-efficacious by elite and white audiences. This is a risk that Heti's and Lerner's novels gradually acknowledge.

She goes on to declare that she has come back from "the other side" to let everyone know that she in fact did have what her first boyfriend claimed was life's goal. She did have a witness. Her last boyfriend truly saw her, her true self, and the truth about her life and eventual death. "My life and death were witnessed, I tell you! Witnessed and foretold!" She concludes her monologue:

I have repeatedly referred to the dilemmas that Heti's and Lerner's narrators attempt to resolve as "false predicaments," and in this I deliberately borrow language from Lerner's novel 10:04. Here, this practice of humorously reframing failure is a strategy taught by the narrator'stherapist.33 Both Heti and Lerner often risk modeling their practice of comic retelling as one of therapy or self-betterment ("Better to have your failure right in front of you than the fantasy in your head," Heti's Sheila tells herself (HSAPB 240). In this particular instance in 10:04, Lerner's unnamed narrator, here speaking in the third person, is meeting a librarian he hopes to impress at a caf. He is concerned that, in not waving when she arrived and then over-compensating by not making eye contact, he has immediately made a "disastrous impression" (61).

Coleman's approach to what he calls "failure" might not be exemplary of criticism, but it certainly exemplifies a kind of readership that Lerner's and Heti's novels can attract and cultivate. If one conceives of failure as externally assigned, as deriving from being misunderstood by others, one expects to be understood, and welcomes instructions to ensure it. This notion of failure suggests itself as native to certain social and cultural milieu: experiencing "imprecise representation" as a personal failure to be resolved through a "mood of comic hopefulness" is a concern for persons who do not encounter "imprecise representation" as a pervasive, structural lived reality; to fret about the personal "failure" of "imprecise representation" is likely to not have experienced, among other things, continual objectification as racially or socially other. Moreover, one must have a particular expectation for misfortune to see "stumbling, slapstick" as an "approach" to dealing with it.

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