Comedic Exaggeration As Setup

How inflated humorous prose transforms an otherwise unfunny punchline.

For many, comedic exaggeration is the funny part—the punchline.

However, in at least one instance author David Stuart MacLean uses comedic exaggeration as the setup to make an otherwise unfunny punchline hilarious in his novel How I Learned to Hate Ohio.

Recently, I’ve explored comedic exaggeration in various forms, but today, I want to look at how it ca…