Poster by Grün for the Café Riche, Paris, 1898
The pattern
This still is filed under Question headline.
Define
The first line is a question the reader was already asking, or one they cannot leave unanswered.
Mechanism
Open loop plus recognition. A good question is the reader's objection, spoken first by us.
Verdict
We know the real objection and can answer it in the next breath.
Why it works
The headline is a question the picture cannot answer, so the poster creates an open loop the passer-by has to close by reading on - and the answer, Au Violon, is French slang for the lock-up, which makes the payoff a joke rather than information. Grün prints the uniforms as unprinted black, so the two policemen cost almost no ink and the red dress becomes the only saturated thing on the sheet; figure-ground is doing the work three extra colours would have done. The black ground also lets the white brush lettering behave as drawn image rather than type, welding headline, picture and venue line into one surface. Composition is a sandwich: question on top, punchline at the bottom, so the eye travels through the woman to get from setup to payoff.
Steal this when
Reach for this when you have one strong visual and a two-beat joke or reveal to deliver - open with a question at the top, put the answer at the foot, and make the reader pass through the image to connect them. Also steal the ink economy: reverse the whole field, and spend your one saturated colour on the single thing that must be looked at.