I don’t think there’s really a punchline - it’s just a silly Steve Wright (or Steve Martin) style joke.
Well, I’ve never heard someone laugh after a joke was explained, but in this case I don’t think there is anything to explain except joke structure. Have you never seen a comic have a little throw away line after the punchline? There’s probably some comedy term for it, but it’s not uncommon. It’s not the punchline, it’s just like a demoument from the joke to ease the transition to the next joke.
Steve Martin’s plumber joke plumbers joke steve martin - YouTube which for some reason I’m thinking of.
Found a website that had comedy terms, it’s called a “tag”.
TV and comics writer Mark Evanier once wrote a story about two hack comedians at a third-tier comedy club. It ended with the larger of the two saying “Don’t you EVER let me catch you doing MY George Carlin routine again!”
According to comedian Mark Normand, if he finds out a joke he said is similar to another comedians and he isn’t sure if he actually created it or if he might have inadvertantly cribbed it while watching someone else he “retires” the joke and only brings it back in an emergency if he needs to fill time. Any joke that’s “parallel thinking” (two comedians who come up with the same type of joke) but he’s sure he came up with it himself he will continue to use.
“If that’s anyone but Steve Allen, he’s stealing my bit!” - Krusty the Clown.
I don’t know how much it’s changed in the ensuing years, but around 1979, *Playboy *ran an article about the world of aspiring standup comics. It discussed how little IP protection there was. Writers would sit ringside with notebooks jotting down material. If they sold the jokes to established comedians who used them in their routines, the originators would get in trouble if they used their own jokes.
Milton Berle was legendary for stealing jokes. Rodney Dangerfield commented on it – with stark, humorless disapproval – in an interview in Laugh Factory magazine in 1984 (Rodney claimed that in contrast, he paid $50 if he heard someone tell a joke he wanted to use). So did *Mad *magazine in an article showing several comedians telling the same joke in their distinctive style. They had Berle telling the joke unchanged from way the originator told it. National Lampoon once described Berle, Williams, and Gabe Kaplan as “notorious joke chiefs, or something that rhymes with it”.
There’s an old timey bit where the comic asks for a “volunteer” from the audience to stand behind them, wrap their arms around his waist, and then help narrate a story he was telling with the volunteers hands.
I’ve seen at least two performers do this.
Guy who’s done standup checking in.
The straightforward answer is they keep notes, insofar as that helps. Almost all comics have books and notes they use to record their material. That’s about as far as it goes.
What comics do NOT do is use jokes other people tell them, not consciously (unless it’s something created in a writing workshop.) I simply cannot use a joke you give me because I’ve no idea where you got it from, and if you heard it on a Netflix comedy special I could end up looking like a joke stealing idiot.
Parallel jokes are just a thing; there is not much you can do about it. I have a short bit about being old and my balls dropping lower than they used to, and at a big show I was emceeing, I was horrified to hear the opening act tell a joke that was so similar that I simply couldn’t use the bit - and I was going to tell it literally right after the opener was done, and I have to change my planned routine. He hadn’t stolen it from me - the wording was different enough, and we’d never worked together before. It’s just an obvious source of humor.
This was THE joke that basically brought Carlos Mencia down and made “joke theft” a much more public concept, back when it was George W. Bush’s wall and not Trump’s.
But part of the reason the accusation of joke theft landed was that the accusing comic had done multiple sets with Mencia in attendance where he used the joke in his act, and Mencia’s telling was extremely similar.
If you’ve heard comics telling variants of that more recently, I can only imagine it’s become such a famous example of a stolen joke that they’re riffing on that concept itself.
He may well have. And Imus and/or his staff were so clueless they used the clip as a promo for their show.
I remember seeing an interview with Rosie O’Donnell, and she said the second time she did an amateur open mike standup she found that repeating a routine she’d seen on late night TV a few days before - word for word, including mannerisms - got her great laughs… but then she pretty much got attacked by the MC backstage “what the hell was that???” - which is how she says she learned that copying jokes was a no-no.