People sometimes ask me how to do the Internet comedy thing, and the biggest piece of advice I can give – and the one I see violated or misunderstood most often – is don’t step on the laugh.
Basically, since you can’t rely on tone or timing to push a punchline in text, you need to avoid making people keep reading after that punchline has been delivered. If there’s still more text, your readers’ natural inclination is going to be to stifle their visceral reaction with the expectation that there’s still more to come – and when there isn’t, the joke just deflates.
Ideally, the specific word that makes the punchline click into place should be the very last word of the post, or at least the last word of the paragraph. Going even one word beyond that point diminishes its impact.
god: i have made Mankind
angels: you fucked up a perfectly good monkey is what you did. look at it. it’s got anxiety
Here, the word “anxiety” is the punch. When people quote it or do their own variations, I very often see them render it as “it’s got anxiety now” – and just like that, it’s not even half as funny, because that extraneous “now” dangling off the end is stepping on the laugh.
Obviously, this isn’t always going to be possible without resorting to contrived phrasing, which you also want to avoid because calling attention to the sentence structure is another common laugh-killer, but you should always make your best effort to identify the exact point at which the reader will have enough information for the punchline to snap into focus, and to put that point as close to the end of the post or paragraph as possible.
(This also applies to spoken comedy, albeit to a lesser extent, since you can just pause for the laugh if you need to. Ever wonder why a joke or anecdote isn’t funny when you tell it? Sure, your delivery might just suck, but I find the more common culprit is that you mangled the phrasing and ended up putting the punchline in the middle of a sentence rather than at the end.)
