We used to really enjoy a long elaborate joke setup with a let down as the punchline in college.
My favorite was "A patron sees a whale sitting in a booth at the bar". You go on and on about him coming back day after day seeing the wale, describing the beverage, etc. Just improv it. The key is going as long as you can while keeping the audience, but still getting that frustration and tension from them.
At the end the patron gets up the courage to talk to the whale explains to the whale that he had seen him for days, was amazed, etc. Then the whale looked at him and responded [insert best whale noise impression].
Since he passed I've seen a bunch of Norm Macdonald videos of this. He really was the best. The moth joke and others that go on for ~30 mins each on Conan are amazing.
He plays them dumb but is basing them off like Russian literature tropes that go way over the audience's head. The repeated build up, let down, and then finally just a silly punch line that could have landed in 3 sentences is incredible. And his ability to play off Conan's occasional shots...
My favorite was "A patron sees a whale sitting in a booth at the bar". You go on and on about him coming back day after day seeing the wale, describing the beverage, etc. Just improv it. The key is going as long as you can while keeping the audience, but still getting that frustration and tension from them.
At the end the patron gets up the courage to talk to the whale explains to the whale that he had seen him for days, was amazed, etc. Then the whale looked at him and responded [insert best whale noise impression].
Since he passed I've seen a bunch of Norm Macdonald videos of this. He really was the best. The moth joke and others that go on for ~30 mins each on Conan are amazing.
He plays them dumb but is basing them off like Russian literature tropes that go way over the audience's head. The repeated build up, let down, and then finally just a silly punch line that could have landed in 3 sentences is incredible. And his ability to play off Conan's occasional shots...