🎤 Dissecting the Punchline: The Case for a Structuralist Framework in Stand-Up Comedy The Frog on the Board 🐸 “Humour can be dissected, as a frog can,” wrote E.B. White, “but the thing dies in the process.” It’s a line frequently trotted out whenever someone dares to take comedy seriously—as if the only dignified response to a joke is a laugh, and never a footnote. But what if the point isn’t to preserve the frog? What if the goal is to understand why it jumps the way it does—and how some frogs leap clean across a room while others barely make the lily pad? In comedy studies, stand-up has often been treated like that frog: alive, sure, but too slippery, too chaotic, too... culturally mucky to warrant real critical attention. Analyses tend to focus on the joke itself (see the General Theory of Verbal Humour by Attardo & Raskin), or the performer’s politics (see Lockyer & Pickering’s Beyond a Joke: The Limits of Humour ), or Sophie Quirk’s study in Why Stand-Up Matters ...