Is there a term for the type of misleading joke comedians such as Stephen Colbert often use?

Question

The Late Show host, Stephen Colbert (an American talk show host, don't mind that, just think of him as some random guy you don't have to care about) quite often uses a type of joke whereby he describes one thing to mislead you, then name the other thing that you've thought the preceding description described but in fact didn't. For example:

• "Some people are buying the wrong 'Fire and Fury'", instead picking up 'Fire and Fury: The Allied Bombing of Germany, 1942-1945' (...) One is a book about taking down a fascist regime, and the other's about WWII.

• This is amazing, this is the meeting of Disney and Beyonce. The world's most beloved brand and... Disney.

• Disney isn't buying all of Fox (...) "not included in the acquisition: Fox News," which really is surprising, cause you'd think that the masters of fantasy and imagination would want to be bought by Disney.

Is there a term for this kind of joke?

Answer 1

On Chris Head's site, a page called "Stand-up Comedy Fundamentals: Part 2, Misdirection" (July 28, 2016) uses the term misdirection for this type of set-up-based joke:

Having explored set-up/ payoff in the first blog we now turn out attention to a particular kind of set-up/ payoff: misdirection. I would unconsciously have laughed at misdirection for years, but I first became consciously aware of it watching Have I Got News For You in the 90s. (A formative decade for me.) I didn't yet have a word for it, but I began to notice that host Angus Deayton would often make the audience assume he was talking about one news story and then, at the last moment, would reveal he was talking about another.

...

Once I had picked up on the technique I began to notice it everywhere. But I didn’t have a word for it until I read veteran US stand-up coach Greg Dean’s book [Step by Step to Stand-up Comedy (2001)] and found that comedians (like magicians) used the word misdirection. Now, twenty years later, when teaching misdirection I often use a list of example gags that I compiled from a range of sources online. Three examples from the list will suffice here:

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." (Jimmy Carr)

I hate people who think it's clever to take drugs...like customs officers. (Jack Dee)

My grandmother started walking five miles a day when she was sixty. She's ninety-seven now, and we don't know where the hell she is. (Ellen Degeneres)

Part of the funniness in all of these is the attitude, namely a flippant attitude to a cancer charity, a rebellious attitude to drugs and a couldn't-care attitude to the elderly. A student on the joke class once described the payoffs as transgressing social norms, and there is some truth in this.

Again though, thinking solely about the mechanism, in all three jokes the set-up creates assumptions. Greg Dean talks about the "target assumption". Then the payoff, the rug-pull as comedians sometimes say, subverts those assumptions.

As Head notes, misdirection is an established term in magicians' terminology. Don Wilmeth, The Language of American Popular Entertainment: A Glossary of Slang and Terminology (1981) has this entry for the term:

Misdirection: The magician's art of diverting the audience's attention from some secret maneuver or device involved in making an illusion or trick work.

The absence here of any discussion of misdirection in the context of stand-up comedy suggests that the term was not well-establish in that sense on 1981. Google books searches for "misdirection joke[s]" turn up eight verifiable matches (not including Greg Dean's book, which is not previewable). Seven of those are from 2010 or later, but one rather skimpy reference (previewable in snippet view only) is from 1981.

Answer 2

I know it is not a single word, but this form of joke is often called a "Bait and Switch" or "Bait and Switch Comparison".

I suppose one word that might cover this is;

Switcheroo

A sudden unexpected variation or reversal, often for a humorous purpose.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switcheroo

Another, perhaps better, is;

Paraprosdokian

A figure of speech in which the latter part of a sentence, phrase, or larger discourse is surprising or unexpected in a way that causes the reader or listener to reframe or reinterpret the first part.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraprosdokian

Answer 3

Paraprosdokian (see this Wiki page) :

A paraprosdokian is a figure of speech in which the latter part of a sentence, phrase, or larger discourse is surprising or unexpected in a way that causes the reader or listener to reframe or reinterpret the first part. It is frequently used for humorous or dramatic effect [...]

Answer 4

Having watched the second clip in your examples, this is an example of antithesis, juxtapositioning and comic irony.

Antithesis

Makes a connection between two things - “That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” (Neil Armstrong) - Your dictionary.com

The connection in your second example is between the brand of Disney and the brand of Beyonce.

The jokes are also ironic (you would expect that when he talks of the best loved brand having just mentioned Beyonce and Disney, he would actually mean Disney but he continues to say he meant Beyonce), so the jokes demonstrate comic irony.

Comic Irony

Irony is often used in literature to produce a comic effect. This may also be combined with satire. For instance, an author may facetiously state something as a well-known fact and then demonstrate through the narrative that the fact is untrue.- Wikipedia

The jokes also demonstrate the use of juxtaposition:

Juxtaposition:

The fact of two things being seen or placed close together with contrasting effect. - OLD

So you could describe the jokes as examples of antithesis, juxtaposition, comic irony, or indeed any combination of these three devices.