Punchlines that are “surprising, yet inevitable”
Keegan-Michael Key, Aristotle, and the art of the zag.
According to Aristotle in his Poetics, the best endings are both “surprising, yet inevitable.” You shouldn’t see it coming, but once it does, it should feel like the only way it could have gone.
Keegan-Michael Key mentioned this when he broke down how he sets up a joke on NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross: “When you're writing a joke, you have to think about, how am I going to turn this at the end? How am I going to zag?”
GROSS: So can you tell a joke and then analyze it for us?
KEY: Yeah. So I can tell you my favorite joke, a joke that Elle told me that evening that, today, to this day, is my favorite joke. And the joke is there's an old lady who calls downstairs to her husband, and she says, Morty, why don't you come upstairs and make love to me? And he says back to her, fine, but I can't do both.
GROSS: OK, so break it down for us.
KEY: OK, so the setup is, as soon as you hear the phrase, she calls downstairs - so you need to hear the word downstairs. So you need to know that the man is downstairs and that she wants him to come up the stairs. It's real basic, but you need to hear the phrase calls downstairs to her husband, Morty, and says to him, why don't you come upstairs and make love to me? Make love to me makes you feel - there's two things that could be happening. One is that you're going, OK, she's an older woman. So is it possible that he doesn't want to make love to her? That might enter your mind. But the other thing is, but making love is a desirable thing and a pleasurable thing. So wouldn't he want to make love to her? Of course he wants to make love to her. It's his wife. He loves her. So that - your brain is starting to bring up all of these answers of what you think the answer to the joke would be. Does that make sense?
GROSS: Yes.
KEY: Yes. So that's how a joke - that's how a setup of a joke works - is the setup always makes you start to assume what direction you think the joke is going in. And then when he says, fine, you go, OK, he's going to go upstairs. He's going to go upstairs. And he says, but I can't do both. The thing is that you then remember that, at the beginning of the joke, you said that she was an old lady, which makes you assume that Morty is also an old man. And you go, oh, I get it. He's old. So he - so once he gets upstairs, he's going to be so winded, he won't be able to make love. I get it. But I can't do both. Aristotle said that the ideal end of a dramatic situation is that it ends and that it's both unexpected and inevitable. So when you hear the end of a joke, a really good joke, usually it's unexpected and inevitable. So you don't - you go, oh, he's an old man. That's inevitable that once he gets up the steps, he's not going to be able to make love. So that is how I would break down that joke - hilarious - right? - absolutely hilarious.
GROSS: But it helps if you're writing a joke to think about that, right?
KEY: Yeah. That's what you have to think about. When you're writing a joke, you have to think about, how am I going to turn this at the end? How am I going to zag? And that's the most important part of the anatomy of a joke - is all the things that you're supposing and all the things that you're assuming when you set up the joke. And then how are you going to turn it on the back end?