Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
My greatest fear is that the audience will beat me to the punch line.
Never go for the punch line. There might be something funnier on the way.
It's hard to be a national punch line unless lots of voters have soured on you.
I'm not much for setup... punch line. I talk about my kids. I talk about my wife.
Professionals don't get writer's block. I can always come up with the punch line.
I always told everybody the perfect joke would be where the setup and punch line were identical.
I'm kind of a nerd. A square. And I'm terrible at telling jokes. I always forget the punch line.
I've spent my fortune, tarnished my public view and made myself the brunt of punch line after punch line.
I had a couple of years in the mid-2000s where it was really confusing to me. I was like, 'Why is our band sometimes a punch line?'
I got into stand-up because I love stand-up. Specifically in stand-up, I love jokes. I love short, structured ideas and a punch line.
When you're 89, dementia develops. I mean, I've told a story onstage, and I'm telling it with a full heart, and I forgot the damn 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.
GIFs work because the punch line is instantaneous. It's entirely different from almost any other form of content on the Internet, which takes time to consume.
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.
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.
Even for natives, French satire is rarely laugh-out-loud funny. Its unspoken punch line is typically that things have gone irrevocably wrong, and the government is to blame.
When I'm directing actors, I often find myself slipping in sports metaphors, like: 'Don't go for the punch line here, just put it up on a T-ball stand so she can hit it out of the park.'
The Punch Line is one of the best clubs in the world. It's an intimidating place if you're a younger comic, but the community is so lucky to have a place with such a high threshold and standard.
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 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.
A lot of times, in other films in the past, you see some drag roles that make you go, 'OK we're the punch line again.' You know, someone comes in and they're like, 'Oh is it a man?' that kind of thing.
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.
Micro humor is a joke that's contained in the writing: it's a punch line, it's a turn of phrase, it's something that you can see on the page, and no matter who's saying it, it is, in and of itself, a funny line.
If you have the right voice and the right delivery, you're cocky enough, and you pound down on the punch line, you can say anything and make people laugh maybe three times before they realize you're not telling jokes.
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.
Saying gay people shouldn't be the punchline is basically saying don't make people the punch line, which I think is ridiculous. The whole point of comedy is, on some level, to make fun of ourselves and put everything into an absurdist context.
I've always felt that there's a lot of similarity between doing a comedy and doing a scary movie because jokes and scares are all about timing. If you give the punch line too early or too late, the joke falls flat. And it's the same with a scare.
Ninety-nine percent is in the delivery. If you have the right voice and the right delivery, you're cocky enough, and you pound down on the punch line, you can say anything and make people laugh maybe three times before they realize you're not telling jokes.
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.
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.
With music, you're laying it all out there. They're judging you right away, and you can lose them quick. With the comedy, you've always got another joke to redeem yourself. Or, even if you've only got one joke, at least the punch line is at the end. Then they have to at least pay attention until the end.
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.
In general, the straight line of a joke sets up a premise, an expectation. Then the funny ending - the punch line - in a sense contradicts the original assumption by refusing to follow what had seemed a reasonable train of thought. Many jokes involve that simple matter of leaping outside what had appeared to be the rules of the game at the moment.