Yesterday in Stephan Pastis’s Pearls Before Swine:
A Stephan Pastis specialty, the formula pun — or setup / payoff pun — joke (with a final panel in which the character Rat threatens the cartoonist (as a cartoon character) with violence for committing a preposterous pun
Two things then: The joke form, and Billy Joel’s “Only the Good Die Young”.
Formula puns. From my 7/6/22 posting “Toad away, groaning”:
Outrageous elaborate set-up puns, based on formulaic expressions, are a genre in themselves, often treated as a kind of shaggy dog story (because of their complexity), though classic shaggy dog stories are anticlimactic, while these formula puns culminate in a complex pay-off [so I sometimes call them setup / payoff puns]. I learned the elaborately transpositional boyfoot bear with teak of Chan in high school, and then the elaborately punning crossing staid lions for immortal porpoises not long after — both, faute de mieux, under the shaggy dog label.
Billy Joel’s formulaic expression. From Wikipedia:
“Only the Good Die Young” is a song written and recorded by Billy Joel from his fifth studio album The Stranger, released in 1978 as its third of four singles.
[The song] was controversial for its time, with the lyrics written from the perspective of a young man determined to have sex with a Catholic girl [AZ: but, despite this pressuring, ultimately failing in his horny campaign]
You can listen to the official audio here.
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