Punch-up

A comedy-writing term that crossed over into video. Nothing about what happens or in what order changes; the pass exists to make lines land harder. The usual moves are trimming words in front of a punchline, swapping a generic noun for a specific one, and deleting the setup that explains a joke before it arrives. It works better handed to somebody other than the writer, who has read the script so many times that the flat lines have gone silent. Punching up a script with a broken structure only puts better jokes on a video that still does not work.