Steve Martin recalls reading a treatise on comedy that led him to think:

" What if there were no punch lines? What if there were no indicators? What if I created tension and never released it? What if I headed for a climax, but all I delivered was an anticlimax? What would the audience do with all that tension? Theoretically, it would have to come out sometime. But if I kept denying them the formality of a punch line, the audience would eventually pick their own place to laugh, essentially out of desperation.[21]"

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Martin periodically spoofed his philosophy studies in his 1970s stand-up act, comparing philosophy with studying geology.

"If you're studying geology, which is all facts, as soon as you get out of school you forget it all, but philosophy you remember just enough to screw you up for the rest of your life.[22]"