I’d like to begin with an apology. Due to a blockage in the pipe, those of you who get this in your email Inbox will have received the word Hull on Wednesday this week, rather than last Friday when it was supposed to go out. I understand that this led some of you to believe that the end of the week had arrived, and there was understandable upset when you realised it hadn’t. I am deeply sorry for any distress this caused and I will make sure it never happens again.
Which leads me on to something I’ve been wanting to say for a while now but couldn’t find the words. It concerns those two universally popular punch lines, “No pressure” and “What could possibly go wrong?” Between them, these two lines are used over three billion times a day all around the world, and if you don’t believe me, count them yourself.
The thing is they’re good, they work, and modern life is constantly throwing up situations where they are absolutely appropriate. You can’t help yourself. To not say “no pressure’ when you’ve just put someone in a highly pressured situation would seem perverse. To tell someone you’re about to attempt the Cresta Run on roller skates, carrying a tray of wine glasses filled with nitroglycerin, without adding “What could possibly go wrong?” would just be daft.
We could try to come up with new punch lines for these scenarios, but that would be like replacing the wheels on your car with landmines. They’re round, right? What could possibly go wrong?
So we’re stuck with the overkill of these magnificent punch lines, but here’s the question: why do we call punch lines punch lines? Is it because they pack a punch, or because of they’re the sort of thing Mr Punch would say? Let’s delve into the bizarre history of the 17th century.
Charles I has been executed and Oliver Cromwell has brought his puritanical values to bear on the land. Possibly foreseeing the unrelenting success of Les Miserables, and particularly Russell Crowe’s interminable swan song on the bridge in Paris (just jump, mate, so we can all go home), he bans theatre. It is a dour and joyless time, but it only lasts a few years before the Restoration and the return with a vengeance of bawdy light entertainment.
Chief among these delights is Punch and Judy. Centred around an abusive domestic relationship involving a man, his wife, his mistress, a baby, a crocodile and a string of sausages, Punch and Judy proves to be comedy heroin. The people just can’t get enough of it. And for the next 200 years it remains popular as a distinctly adult entertainment.
Derived from the Venetian Commedia dell’Arte, Punch took his name from the Italian character Pulcinella (little turkey). But by this time the word ‘punch’ already existed in the English language. Initially a tool for making holes, as it still is today (my personal favourite stationery item – what’s yours?), it quickly became a verb meaning to make holes and by the 1570s it was being used in the violent, boxing sense. So impactful were these punches that by the start of the 1600s it was already being used for the pungent alcoholic cocktail served in a bowl.
So by the time Punch first copped it from Judy’s rolling pin on 9 May 1662, our many uses of ‘punch’ as a noun and a verb were already established. The term ‘punch line’, however, did not enter the vernacular until the early 20th century, when it was first used as a songwriting term. It seems fair to assume, then, that it had nothing to do with Mr Punch and everything to do with the impact of the line in question.
So, to think of a fitting punch line to round of this week’s article. I know, I’ll leave it to you, the reader. That’s the way to do it.
