Tag Archives: organization

Jokes have a three-act structure? Who knew?

In The Princeton Guide to Historical Research (p. 280), I note that many historians structure their works in three parts (plus an introduction and conclusion), allowing for a thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. I borrowed this idea from drama and cinema.

Now I learn from Elliott Kalan’s Joke Farming: How to Write Comedy and Other Nonsense that jokes can work the same way. He writes:

Let’s look at a joke from the all-time great stand-up Rita Rudner:

I broke up with my boyfriend. He wanted to get married, and I didn’t want him to.

You could break it down as “setup/punchline” structure, like this:

Setup: “I broke up with my boyfriend.”

Punchline: “He wanted to get married, and I didn’t want him to.”

Or this way:

Setup: “I broke up with my boyfriend. He wanted to get married,”

Punchline: “and I didn’t want him to.”

But to me, it feels more elegant to break down the structure like this:

Act 1: “I broke up with my boyfriend.” (establishing a premise)

Act 2: “He wanted to get married,” (bridge, providing new information)

Act 3: “and I didn’t want him to.” (payoff, with surprising, but logical, information)

It’s nice to think I have something in common with great comedians!

Tables of Contents as Full-Sentence Outlines

Writers of legal or policy briefs often need to summarize their arguments in a single page in order to reach busy, powerful readers. Tables of contents composed of claims are particularly effective ways to achieve this, since readers intrigued by any claim can turn to the section which develops it more fully.

Even if historians do not format their final writings in this way, they may benefit from writing their outlines as a series of claims, reminding themselves of what they need to achieve in each section. (For more on outlining, see The Princeton Guide to Historical Research, chapter 13.)

Here are two examples of such tables of contents—one from law, the other from public policy.

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