A punch line (also punch-line or punchline) concludes a joke; it is intended to make people laugh.
In a broader sense, "punch line" can also refer to the unexpected and funny conclusion of any performance, situation or story.
[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.
[3] Thomas R. Shultz, a psychologist, independently expands Raskin's linguistic theory to include "two stages of incongruity: perception and resolution".
[6] In laboratory settings, however, none of these changes are employed at a statistically significant level in the production of humorous narratives.
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.
In the analysis of longer humorous texts, an expanded model is needed to map the narratological structure.
[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] Felicitous jokes are often formatted in a style called AAB,[11] (referred to as an A-A-A' triad by Yves Lavandier in Writing Drama) where a joke is made up of a set of three, the first two of which share some common attribute, and the third represents a deviation from that attribute.
However, jokes following the AAB structure are consistently rated as being funnier than their AB or AAAB counterparts.