[janandonly]

“Monday, Tuesday, Banana”. The first two components, which create an expectation, are the set-up; and, the third that confounds the expectation is the payoff, or the punchline.

To take an example from Jimmy Carr.

    A lady with a clipboard stopped me in the street the other day.
    She said, "Can you spare a few minutes for Cancer Research?"
    I said, "All right, but we're not going to get much done.”

[neonate]

Your comment is nothing but a quote from the article. Why?

[SideburnsOfDoom]

It's called the "rule of three". 2 examples to define a trend line, and the 3rd one to subvert expectations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_three_(writing)#Comedy

[altdataseller]

I'm dumb.. what's the punchline in that joke?

[Joeboy]

"Can you spare a few minutes for Cancer Research?" is a thing people say when they're trying to get you to donate to cancer research charities. Jimmy interprets it instead as meaning she wants him to spend a few minutes doing actual cancer research himself (which would be unlikely to be very productive).

[SuperCuber]

The lady meant to spare a few minutes to talk about cancer research, the punchline is misinterpreting that as a suggestion to do actual cancer research

[orionion]

> A lady with a clipboard stopped me in the street the other day. She said, "Can you spare a few minutes for Cancer Research?" I said, "All right, breast is fine - but I draw th line at colorectal on the first date.”