Monthly Archives: October 2020

Joke About Murder Hornets

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The joke:

Bug hunters in Washington state found the first ever Asian giant “murder hornets” nest in the U.S. They said the nest used to have bees living in it. It was an Air-bee-n-bee.

How I wrote it:

This news item caught my eye because “murder hornets” just sound weird.

To create the joke I started with my Punch Line Maker #1: Link two associations of the topic. The two most obvious topic handles were “murder” and “hornets.” And as I thought about hornets, the association “bees” occurred to me.

But instead of somehow linking “bees” with “murder,” my mind went to another possible handle, “nest.” That’s because “Airbnb” popped into my head, thanks to some wordplay with “bee.” And “Airbnb” is linked to “nest” through the association “place to live.” So I ended up basing a punch line on different topic handles than I started with.

My Joke Maximizer #4 is “Make everything clear.” So I needed an angle that would ensure that the audience got my potentially confusing punch line.

My angle does that in two ways. First, it includes the word “bees,” so when the audience hears the punch line “Airbnb” the double meaning of “bee” is obvious.

And second, my angle says that other insects lived in the nest previously. This plants the idea of temporary housing in the audience’s minds, getting them ready to hear “Airbnb.”

I wrote “Air-bee-n-bee” for the text version of the punch line because I think someone who read “Airbnb” would have immediately thought that the nest was in somebody’s horrible insect-infested apartment and not gotten the joke.

Joke About a 2,350-Pound Pumpkin

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The joke:

This week a 2,350-pound pumpkin won a pumpkin-growing contest in California. Spectators were amazed. It’s orange, it weighs a ton, and nobody made a joke about President Trump.

How I wrote it:

When I read this news item I immediately thought of my Punch Line Maker #2: Link the topic to pop culture. The topic handle “pumpkin,” and its association “orange,” immediately called to mind the often-commented-on skin tone of our president, Donald Trump.

But I had a problem. Jokes about Trump’s orangey hue have been hacky for a long time, and I try not to be hacky.

Still, the other topic handle, “2350-pound,” also suggested Trump, who is known for being overweight. The fact that I could link that prize-winning pumpkin to Trump in two ways made a Trump/pumpkin punch line impossible to resist.

To minimize the hackiness of the joke, I decided to write a punch line where the surprise was that none of the spectators made a hacky Trump/pumpkin joke. That way I could do the hacky joke without actually doing it, thus preserving some of my self-respect.

The angle beginning “Spectators were amazed” smoothly leads the audience from the topic, which describes an amazing pumpkin, to a punch line which is surprising but also makes sense: the spectators were amazed by a phenomenon entirely different from what the audience for the joke expected. “Surprising but also makes sense” describes all well-written punch lines.

I got lucky that the pumpkin weighed 2,350 pounds. It meant that I could write “weighs a ton” and be both factually accurate about the pumpkin and colloquially accurate about Trump.

Joke About Sexual Onions

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The joke:

Facebook removed an ad for onions for being “overtly sexual.” Then they restored the ad and fired an ad censor for being “overtly lonely.”

How I wrote it:

This news item got my attention because it raised the question in my mind “Who would think onions are sexual?” That is, the news item suggested that I consider using my Punch Line Maker #3: Ask a question about the topic.

To answer that question, I thought about the topic handle “onions” and its associations like “round,” “smooth,” and “inanimate.” And based on those, I decided that the surprising answer to my question, and the basis of my punch line, would be “someone who’s really, really lonely.” 

To make the joke as funny as possible, I used my Joke Maximizer #6–Make the punch line parallel. That is, I worded the punch line as “fired an ad censor for being “overtly lonely,” in order to echo as much as possible the wording in the topic “removed an ad for onions for being “overtly sexual.”

I also included in my angle the words “Then they restored the ad,” to make the joke easier to understand; my Joke Maximizer #4 is “Make everything clear.” Unless Facebook did an about-face and restored the ad, it wouldn’t be immediately obvious to the audience that whoever had removed the ad had committed a fireable offense.

Did a human ad censor, in fact, remove that onion ad? No, the news item says that “automated technology” did. But I decided that my audience wouldn’t know or care about that detail. Plus I needed a fireable human to make the joke work.

Joke About Trump and Covid-19

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The joke:

President Trump is still in the hospital for Covid-19. Doctors say the good news is the virus isn’t making any progress because Trump’s immune system keeps interrupting it.

How I wrote it:

I wanted to write a joke about Trump contracting Covid-19 because it was a huge news story. But, as always, I also wanted to write a joke that could be enjoyed by as many people as possible. That’s a tricky task, because Trump is so polarizing.

So when I used my Punch Line Maker #1–Link two associations of the topic–I only considered associations that I thought most people would have, not just Trump haters and not just Trump supporters.

That meant when I came up with associations of the topic handle “Trump,” I rejected associations like “he deserves to be infected,” because plenty of people might disagree with that.

Instead, I went with an association that I thought everyone would be willing to accept, that in the first Presidential Debate, Trump had interrupted Biden constantly.

Associations of the other topic handle, “Covid-19,” include “immune system fights virus.” So I was able to create a punch line by substituting the idea of interrupting for the idea of fighting.

Because the news about Trump’s condition was so fast-moving at the time I wrote the joke, I crafted a topic that describes his status in general terms, so the joke would have a little longer shelf life.

I worded the angle as “the virus isn’t making any progress” so it would suggest something that someone in a debate might do. A wording like “the virus is being neutralized” wouldn’t have guided the audience from the topic to the punch line quite as smoothly.