Monthly Archives: July 2019

Joke About a Cryptocurrency Theft

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The joke:

A Japanese cryptocurrency exchange was hacked and lost 3.5 billion yen worth of virtual money. To put that into perspective, that’s no money.

How I wrote it:

Cryptocurrencies seem to me to be such a sketchy financial vehicle that my first thought on reading this news item was something like, “Is virtual money even real?”

That thought led me to use Punch Line Maker #6: State the obvious about the topic. PLM #6 starts with the writer asking an obvious question suggested by the topic, which I had already done. And I assumed that most other people would have the same question.

The next step in PLM #6 is to write a punch line based on the obvious answer to that obvious question. I thought that most of my audience would agree with the answer that virtual money isn’t real money, so I wrote the punch line “that’s no money.”

Finally, I added the angle “To put that into perspective…” I thought it would mislead the audience into thinking that the rest of the sentence was going to tell them more about the huge size of the sum of stolen money. That mislead would make the punch line more surprising, and therefore funnier.

The original news story reported “the loss of 3.5 billion yen, or $32 million, worth of virtual money.” For my joke I quoted the amount of money in yen instead of dollars because I thought that made the virtual money sound even sketchier.

Joke About That 7.1 Earthquake

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The joke:

Recently Southern California was rocked by a 7.1 magnitude earthquake. The good news is, as a 7.1, it’s unlikely that President Trump would grope it.

How I wrote it:

I focused on this topic because it was a big news story and it had a couple of handles–“Southern California” and “earthquake”–with a lot of associations.

At first I considered using Punch Line Maker #1–Link two associations of the topic. But I had recently used that technique to write a joke about actor Jussie Smollett’s reaction to an earthquake.

So instead I turned to Punch Line Maker #2–Link the topic to pop culture–and to a different topic handle, “7.1.” As I brainstormed associations of “7.1,” it occurred to me that some people rate the physical attractiveness of women on a scale of 1 to 10.

Turning to pop culture, I asked myself who my audience would associate with assigning numerical ratings to women, and President Trump came to mind. He’s made no secret of the fact that a woman’s attractiveness is important to him.

So the basis of my punch line became President Trump treating the earthquake as a fairly attractive woman, i.e., a 7.1.

I could have worded the punch line something like, “A 7.1. Or as President Trump would say, ‘fairly attractive.'” But instead I used Joke Maximizer #8–“Wildly exaggerate.” I implied that our President is so obsessed with attractiveness ratings that he’d even consider groping an earthquake.

Joke About the Democratic Debate

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The joke:

Airing tonight on NBC is the first Democratic presidential debate. Over 20 million people are expected to watch…and those are just the candidates.

How I wrote it:

I picked the debate as a joke topic because it was very much in the news at the time.

I originally worded the topic something like “Tonight is the first Democratic presidential debate.” That topic only has one handle–“Democratic presidential debate”–so I started by brainstorming associations of that.

One fairly obvious association is “there are a lot of Democratic presidential candidates,” which has the sub-association “a lot of people.” To use Punch Line Maker #1–Link two associations of the topic–I also needed a second topic handle which is associated with “a lot of people.”

So I added to the topic a second handle–“airing on NBC”–which has the association “number of viewers” and the sub-association “a lot of people.” Now I could write a punch line based on the shared association “a lot of people.”

I added the angle “Over 20 million people are expected to watch” to guide the joke’s audience smoothly and logically from the topic to the punch line.

I picked the figure “20 million” for the number of candidates because Joke Maximizer #8 advises us to “Wildly exaggerate.” But 20 million also seemed like a plausible size for a debate audience, so using that number would help mislead the audience for the joke into thinking I was referring to TV viewers right up until the surprising laugh trigger, “candidates.”