Term for a joke with a missing punchline

Question

What do you call a joke that has a punchline which as been emphatically implied through omission,  as in...

[Comedian peeling banana, saying...]
"one skin, two skin, three skin, (pregnant pause)...five skin"

[...arch look and lifted eyebrows]
Benny Hill used to do a lot of this, and I am trying find a name for it.
I have looked up types and classes of jokes, but cannot find a definition for it.

Cascabel · Accepted Answer

Thanks to Mobitela Fonia's  answer, and (now it seems) to K J's comment, I was able to track down a definition at the same source which pretty much gave the best answer.

Stealth pun

The writers put in a joke (almost always a pun), but never make or put in a Punch Line or explicit statement, hiding it in the set up of the joke. Some percentage of the audience will "get" the joke, but the rest will know it was there and be going, "What? Why didn't you say it?" There can be several reasons.
  
  1) It's naughty or otherwise not appropriate for this timeslot, in which case this serves the same purpose as a Last-Second Word Swap.

-TV Tropes

Tuffy · Answer

I should imagine it would have to be something which, as with all jokes, creates an expectation, which it then disappoints, but perhaps not without a double entendre.  How about this?

Iocus interruptus

Mobitela Fonia · Answer

According to "TV-Tropes" a joke without a punchline is an "orphaned setup" (the information was obtained from: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OrphanedSetup).

When characters tell jokes, the whole joke is rarely told. We hear either the punchline or setup. In this case, only the setup.

So in this case there is no real punchline, and is "orphaned".

Mobitela Fonia · Answer

Also, another way of naming a joke of this sort is a "mind joke" a bit like a "mind rhyme" (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_rhyme).
But, as far as I have seen, an official name for this joke-form does not exist.

Delilah22 · Answer

I do not know if there exists some unique type of humor for it. But I think that there are a few types of humor that could support the kind we are discussing here.
Right now the ones that come to my mind are: Wit and Wordplay.

user405662 · Answer

How about this one?
shaggy-dog story

A long, drawn-out anecdote ending with an absurd or anticlimactic punch line.

Term for a joke with a missing punchline

6 Answers

Add your own answers!

Ask a Question