A joke can be broken down into two sections: The setup, which isn’t necessarily funny, and the punchline, which better be.
Facing a crowd that’s looking to laugh, comics tend to want to get to the payoff as quickly as possible. But there is a rich tradition of jokes that move in the opposite direction, where part of what’s funny is that the setup keeps going and going, long past what you expect.
The most famous example might be the Aristocrats, the rare joke that inspired its own documentary. An old bit, it begins with a setup about family members trying to get an agent to book their act and its humor tends to be fundamentally dirty and gratuitous. But in the last year, some of the most ambitious new hours have used the long setup to develop more rarefied kinds of jokes, formally inventive, experimental and very funny.
Witness the magnificently unusual joke midway through Ronny Chieng’s recent special, “Love to Hate It” (Netflix), which begins with him trying to find common ground with the MAGA movement, saying its supporters have a point that the country has problems. Slowing his aggressive rat-a-tat delivery, he lists evidence of decline — bad health-care outcomes, wealth inequality — and just when you expect a punchline to lighten the mood, he gets even more serious.
Adopting the tone of a politician, he says that we did not fulfill the implicit promise that if you worked hard and played by the rules, you could make it. At this point, the comedy seems to have ground to a halt. It’s also when Chieng’s pace shifts, from slow and deliberate to pointedly sped up as he rapidly unspools a grand unified theory. The tempo of his hard-to-follow chatter, which covers tax and trade policy, among other economic minutiae, indicates a departure from logical argument and a venture into the ridiculous. It recalls how everyone from Stanley Kubrick to Benny Hill has used fast forward to create comedy.
What’s impressive is not the insight of the analysis, though it is coherent if you follow with subtitles, but how Chieng controls the crowd response with the pace instead of the subject. Even if they can’t keep up with what he’s saying, everyone laughs at the same moments because of when he shifts gears. The comic moves here are all in the form. It all builds to a satirical point about the difference in messaging between left and right when Chieng stops speechifying, takes a breath and utters the punchline: “But if you don’t read enough, it comes out: Let’s go, Brandon.”
Most stand-ups wouldn’t try this joke because going for such a long stretch without anything resembling a punchline could be greeted by silence, the worst fate for a comic. Gary Gulman’s new show, “Grandiloquent,” at the Lucille Lortel Theater, is about, among other things, this anxiety: how an insecure need for approval emerged from childhood, what distorting effects it had on his personality and how, as he puts it, it contributes to the subtext of his entire career: “I’m smart, right?”
It’s why Gulman, a masterly joke technician, has always favored words like “grandiloquent” (which means the use of extravagant language in an attempt to impress). This show-offy instinct has long benefited him. In a culture more terrified of elitism than philistinism, Gulman creates brainy, word-drunk art that aims high. This show covers familiar ground for Gulman but also ventures deeper into the therapist’s office.
He’s mocking and celebrating his try-hard personality while also delivering his most emotional comedy. It’s a lot. And it becomes unbalanced in an epic long joke that is, in its audaciousness, impressive.
It begins as he and his wife are listening to a song in the car by the band Audioslave and she asks an innocent question: “Who sings this?”
This poor woman has no idea what is about to hit her: A monologue covering among other things, the history of grunge, the basketball player Mookie Blaylock, the author Mary Shelley and the Old English poem “Beowulf.” This apotheosis of mansplaining goes on for many minutes, a 10th of the script. The one-sided scene ends with his wife saying dryly: “Oh, we’re here.”
With a coat, tie and Van Dyke beard, Gulman looks like the head of a very important money-strapped literary publishing house. His onstage magnetism is considerable. And the fact that he holds your attention, even getting laughs at his own expense, through this pointedly tedious lecture is a testament to his gifts. It’s a laudable effort. But it distorts the show, proving an awkward lead-in to a more heartfelt coda. The thing about these long jokes is they are high risk, high reward.
Hannah Einbinder’s special last year, “Everything Must Go” (Max), had many eccentric jokes but the most memorable was an extreme vibe shift when she described a miraculous epiphany at her grandmother’s funeral. She starting singing a Hebrew prayer that interrupted the jokes and went on for nearly two minutes. After she finished, she asked how she sang this prayer despite not knowing Hebrew. In that moment a comedy had become something like a religious mystery. Then it hit her. It’s the song at the end of “Schindler’s List.”
In each of these long jokes from Chieng, Gulman and Einbinder, there comes a moment where the comedy stems from disbelief that the setup is going on this long. You expect it to end but it doesn’t, and that makes it only more ridiculous. What each bit also shares is the comedy of not just subverting expectations but also unsettling the entire enterprise.
The jokes change genres, moods and the sense of what’s possible, juxtaposing punchlines with wildly incongruous elements from politics and religion. At their core, these long jokes are attempts to destabilize the audience and make us wonder how much longer will this go on and what could possibly happen next.
The biggest laughs erupt when comics take the conventions we know and blow them up or just distort them. Tig Notaro regularly does this with long patient jokes that use repetition to surprise and ramp up absurdity. There are potent laughs in such formal trickery, ones that stick with you. Andy Kaufman read “The Great Gatsby” onstage to audiences who were expecting a joke that never came, and people are still talking about it. He was trying an even more radical stunt: A setup with no punchline.
Norm Macdonald — whose moth joke is one of the great examples of the long form — actually did something similar on “Saturday Night Live.” In a bit he wrote for Weekend Update (cut after dress rehearsal), Chris Farley tells a story about meeting a guy and starting to say something to him, then Farley sputters and repeats himself until he admits he forgot what he was going to say. It’s all setup, then a fizzle of a punchline. And yet, it remains hilarious and oddly relatable. Who has not excitedly begun a story then forgotten what they were going to say?
A punchline is by its nature artificial, contrived, a pat resolution. Replacing that with a simple bit of recognizable human behavior can sometimes be the funniest twist.
