Anti-Comedy: A Guide to the Art of Refusing the Punchline

Anti-comedy is comedy that refuses the deal. A normal joke promises a setup and a payoff; anti-comedy withholds the payoff, delivers one so flat or so late that it barely counts, or performs a joke so badly on purpose that the failure becomes the event. It is not the absence of craft. It is craft aimed at a different target: your expectations about how comedy is supposed to work.

It is also the strand of alternative comedy most likely to divide a room. Some people find a ninety-second pause before a terrible punchline the funniest thing they have ever seen. Others want their money back. This guide explains how anti-comedy works, where it comes from, who does it best and how to get into it.

What anti-comedy actually is

The simplest unit is the anti-joke: a line that looks like a joke but answers itself literally. The oldest example is the chicken that crossed the road to get to the other side, a riddle with no twist. Children's anti-jokes work the same way, and so does a lot of internet humour.

Anti-comedy as a performance style goes much further. It takes the whole apparatus of comedy (the joke, the persona, the showbiz confidence, the audience's job to laugh) and makes that apparatus the subject. When it works, the laugh arrives late and from an odd angle: you laugh at the nerve, at the length, at your own discomfort, or because you suddenly realise the comic knows exactly what they are doing.

How it works: six techniques

1. The withheld punchline. A long, elaborate story that ends on something deliberately feeble. The moth joke Norm Macdonald told on The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien in 2009 runs for minutes through a moth's existential crisis at a podiatrist's office and lands on a pun that is almost an insult. The audience laughs at the journey and the gall.
2. Duration and repetition. Saying the same thing again and again, past the point of comfort, until a new laugh emerges on the far side. Stewart Lee is the master; so is Tim Robinson.
3. The bad comedian, perfectly played. A character who is a terrible entertainer. Gregg Turkington's Neil Hamburger and Andy Kaufman's Tony Clifton are the classics.
4. Hostility to the audience. Insulting, ignoring or lecturing the people who paid to be entertained, ideally while they are laughing.
5. Dead air and literalism. Silence where a joke should be, or answering a comic setup as if it were a sincere question.
6. Format sabotage. Taking a familiar container (a talk show, a public-access ad, a stand-up special) and breaking it from inside. Between Two Ferns, The Eric Andre Show and Tim Heidecker's deliberately dire Netflix special An Evening with Tim Heidecker (2020) all do this.

Where anti-comedy came from

The impulse is old. The Dada performers at Zurich's Cabaret Voltaire in 1916 staged nonsense as a protest against meaning. Ernie Kovacs's 1950s television experiments treated the medium itself as a joke. But the modern form has two main American sources.

Early Steve Martin

Before he was a film star, Steve Martin spent years building a stand-up act out of parody: a mock-confident showman with an arrow through his head, a banjo and a stack of deliberately pointless gags. In his memoir Born Standing Up (2007), he describes deciding to remove punchlines altogether, so that tension would build without release and audiences would have to choose for themselves when to laugh. By the late 1970s it had made him the biggest stand-up in America, which is the strangest success story anti-comedy has.

Andy Kaufman

Andy Kaufman is anti-comedy's patron saint. On the first episode of Saturday Night Live in 1975 he stood beside a record player, waiting nervously through the Mighty Mouse theme until it was time to mime a single line. As Foreign Man he told jokes so badly that audiences pitied him, then turned into a flawless Elvis impersonation. He read The Great Gatsby aloud to audiences who wanted jokes. He sent Tony Clifton, an abusive lounge singer, out in his place. He wrestled women and feuded with the wrestler Jerry Lawler, a storyline that spilled onto Late Night with David Letterman in 1982. The joke was never inside the act; it was the gap between what the audience wanted and what Kaufman gave them, and whether any of it was real.

The key figures

Norm Macdonald

The anchor of Saturday Night Live's “Weekend Update” from 1994 to 1997, Norm Macdonald brought anti-comedy into mainstream television by sheer stubbornness. His signature moves were the deliberately ancient joke delivered with total conviction, and the shaggy-dog story whose real punchline is how long he made you wait. At the 2008 Comedy Central roast of Bob Saget, surrounded by comics trying to out-shock each other, he told a string of hopelessly corny, clean old jokes, and the clip has outlived nearly everything else said that night. He died in 2021.

Neil Hamburger (Gregg Turkington)

Since the 1990s, Gregg Turkington has played Neil Hamburger: a greasy-haired, tuxedoed lounge comic clutching several drinks, who clears his throat into the microphone and delivers jokes that are correctly built and spiritually poisoned, often aimed at celebrities with a bitterness far out of proportion. Hamburger's albums came out on the indie label Drag City. Turkington later took the character into the bleak 2015 film Entertainment and co-created On Cinema at the Cinema with Tim Heidecker, a deadpan film-review show that has grown into a sprawling, years-long saga.

Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim

Tim and Eric industrialised anti-comedy for Adult Swim, first with the animated Tom Goes to the Mayor (2004–06) and then Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! (2007–10), produced by Bob Odenkirk. Fake commercials, public-access video effects, amateur performers and songs that go on too long made a whole aesthetic out of things going wrong. Heidecker has kept pushing: his stand-up character is a smug, failing comic, and our Tim Heidecker profile follows the thread.

Stewart Lee

The leading British exponent, Stewart Lee builds hour-long shows from repetition, digression and running commentary on his own act: he tells the audience which bits are not working, which sections of the room are failing to understand him, and how he would be doing this better if they were cleverer. Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle (BBC Two, 2009–16) brought the style to television. Lee has often credited Ted Chippington, a 1980s British comic who delivered pointless material in a total deadpan, as a formative influence.

Eric André

The Eric Andre Show (Adult Swim, from 2012) takes the late-night talk show and wrecks it: a set that gets destroyed, a host who attacks his own desk, celebrity guests who are never quite sure what is happening, and hidden-camera street bits. It is anti-comedy as physical assault on a format.

Zach Galifianakis

Between Two Ferns, which began on Funny or Die in 2008, is a public-access interview show where the host is unprepared, rude and hostile to famous guests. The awkwardness is engineered with great precision.

Tim Robinson and Nathan Fielder

Two of the decade's biggest comedy voices descend from this lineage. I Think You Should Leave runs on escalation past the point of reason; Nathan Fielder uses an unbroken deadpan and total commitment to the bit in real-world situations, where the discomfort is the comedy.

The British and Australian wave

Beyond Lee, the UK tradition includes Simon Munnery (Alan Parker: Urban Warrior, the League Against Tedium) and the festival comics who treat the form as a puzzle. The Australian Sam Simmons won the Edinburgh Comedy Award in 2015 with a chaotic, deliberately fractured show, and Jordan Brookes won it in 2019 with a set built on awkwardness, silence and self-sabotage. Both are good examples of how the Fringe still rewards anti-comedy.

Why anti-comedy works

Anti-comedy depends on an educated audience. You can only subvert a joke structure that people already know by heart. That is why it tends to appear when a mainstream form becomes polished and predictable: Martin against the slick nightclub comic, Kaufman against 1970s variety television, Tim and Eric against glossy cable commercials, Stewart Lee against the arena circuit of the 2000s.

Psychologically, it plays with the tension-and-release model of laughter. A conventional joke builds a small tension and releases it at the punchline. Anti-comedy builds tension and leaves it hanging, so the eventual release (a laugh of surrender, embarrassment or recognition) is bigger and stranger. It also makes the audience complicit. You are not just watching the joke fail; you are part of the failure.

There is a social layer too. Liking anti-comedy can be a badge of being in on it, which is both its appeal and its risk. The best practitioners make sure the in-joke has a real joke at its core; the weakest mistake confusion for depth.

When it goes wrong

Anti-comedy is easy to imitate badly. Bad jokes told badly are just bad jokes. What separates Norm Macdonald from a heckle-worthy open-micer is timing, commitment and the sense that the performer could be conventionally funny any time they liked and has chosen not to be. Audiences can feel that difference, even when they can't name it. If you're a performer drawn to this style, our guide to starting out in alt comedy is a better first step than an hour of dead air.

For the darker, more political version of this impulse (comedy that refuses to make you comfortable for ideological reasons), see our essay on politics and anti-humour. For the dream-logic cousin of anti-comedy, see absurdist comedy.

Frequently asked questions

What is anti-comedy?

Anti-comedy is comedy that deliberately refuses or sabotages the usual structure of a joke. Instead of a satisfying punchline it offers a flat, literal, endless or hostile one, and the laugh comes from the audience's frustrated expectation rather than from the joke itself.

Who does anti-comedy?

The best-known practitioners are Andy Kaufman, Norm Macdonald, Gregg Turkington as Neil Hamburger, Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim, Stewart Lee, Eric André and Zach Galifianakis in Between Two Ferns. Early Steve Martin is an important forerunner.

What is the difference between anti-comedy and alternative comedy?

Alternative comedy is the broad umbrella for comedy that rejects mainstream conventions. Anti-comedy is one specific strand of it, focused on subverting the joke form itself. All anti-comedy is alternative; most alternative comedy is not anti-comedy.

Which British comedians do anti-comedy?

Stewart Lee is the most prominent, and he has often cited the 1980s deadpan comic Ted Chippington as an influence. Simon Munnery, Jordan Brookes (2019 Edinburgh Comedy Award winner) and the Australian Sam Simmons (2015 winner) also work in the tradition.

What is an example of an anti-joke?

The oldest is “Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side.” It sets up a riddle and answers it literally, with no twist. Modern anti-comedy stretches that same refusal across whole routines and shows.