Monthly Archives: June 2021

Joke About Gunplay at Burger King

Posted on by

The joke:

In Tennessee, two people were arrested for reportedly shooting up a Burger King after a dispute over a chicken sandwich. Apparently for them, “Have It Your Way” included wearing handcuffs.

How I wrote it:

This news item caught my attention because the crime it describes is so dumb. Plus the news item includes several topic handles that I thought I could turn into a punch line by using my Punch Line Maker #1: Link two associations of the topic.

But which two topic handles should I focus on? Put another way, which two words or phrases in the topic are most responsible for attracting my, and my audience’s, attention? The topic handles need to grab the audience’s attention because the audience has to remember them in order to understand the punch line.

One possible pair of topic handles is “shooting” and “chicken sandwich.” The idea that somebody sprayed bullets because of a mere chicken sandwich does grab one’s attention.

But years ago I had used similar handles taken from a news story about another fast food shooting to write the punch line “bun control,” which merges “bun” and “gun control.” And I didn’t want to repeat myself here.

So instead I considered the pair of topic handles “Burger King” and “arrested.” Appearing together in a news story, those words also grab one’s attention: who wouldn’t be interested in an arrest in a familiar restaurant like Burger King?

One association of “Burger King” is its longstanding slogan, “Have It Your Way.” And one association of “arrested” is “wearing handcuffs.” The punch line that I wrote connects those two associations.

As that process shows, sometimes a topic offers more than two possible candidates for topic handles. To pick which ones to use, just try them in the Punch Line Makers one or two at a time and see which ones lead to the funniest joke.

Joke About a Naked Skydiver

Posted on by

The joke:

A Nebraska man set a new world record by making 60 skydiving jumps in 24 hours while naked. He also set a new world record for most seagulls lodged in a human rectum.

How I wrote it:

This news item attracted my interest because it described such a weird achievement. It also summoned up a vivid image in my mind, pointing me toward my Punch Line Maker #5: Visualize the topic.

Having formed a mental image of the topic–a naked guy repeatedly plummeting through the sky–I took that mental image to an extreme: I envisioned the guy hitting birds on his way down.

Then I made the image even more extreme by visualizing the birds slamming into his naked butt. And that warped image became the basis of my punch line.

To make my punch line as funny as possible, I used my Joke Maximizer #9: Get specific. Instead of “birds” I wrote the more-specific “seagulls.” And I changed “butt” to the more-specific “human rectum.”

“Rectum” also takes advantage of my Joke Maximizer #7: Use stop consonants, alliteration, and assonance. The word has the stop consonant sounds K and T.

Adding the word “human” also makes it immediately clear that the punch line refers to the naked guy’s own rectum, as opposed to…oh, I don’t know…a seagull’s rectum.

Finally I added an angle that uses my Joke Maximizer #6: Make the punch line parallel. “He also set a new world record for” copies as closely as possible the structure of the phrase “A Nebraska man set a new world record by” which is at the beginning of the topic.

Joke About Explosive Diarrhea

Posted on by

The joke:

Reports say that production of the upcoming NBC series “Ultimate Slip ‘N Slide” was halted after an outbreak of “explosive diarrhea” on the set. But why? Isn’t a show called “Ultimate Slip ‘N Slide” the perfect place for explosive diarrhea?

How I wrote it:

This story caught my attention because a number of news outlets covered it. Plus it’s really disgusting.

The phrase “explosive diarrhea” called to my mind a vivid mental picture. So I decided to use my Punch Line Maker #5: Visualize the topic.

My next step was to form a different, exaggerated perspective on that vivid mental picture. I did so by considering the title of that NBC series and imagining people slipping ‘n’ sliding on all that diarrhea.

To turn that exaggerated perspective into a punch line, I took the advice of my Punch Line Maker #6–State the obvious about the topic. If people were slipping ‘n’ sliding around on diarrhea, wouldn’t they obviously fit right into a show called “Ultimate Slip ‘N Slide?” And I had my punch line.

Before sending my joke out into the world, I asked myself whether it was so disgusting that my audience wouldn’t accept it and wouldn’t laugh.

But I figured that if multiple news outlets had decided that their audience would accept a story about “explosive diarrhea,” then most of my audience would probably accept a not-particularly-graphic joke about the story.

And I remembered this advice about doing edgy comedy that writer/director Mel Brooks said he once received from John Calley, then head of production at Warner Bros.: “If you’re going to go up to the bell, ring it.”

I had decided to go up to the bell, which was the news story about diarrhea. So I rang that bell by doing the sort of disgusting joke that the diarrhea story was made for.

Joke About Eating Cicadas

Posted on by

The joke:

Today the FDA said to avoid eating cicadas if you’re allergic to seafood. Was that really necessary? Was anybody really looking for a reason not to eat cicadas?

How I wrote it:

When I read the news item about eating cicadas I had the reaction “That’s disgusting.” Having an emotional reaction to a news story is a sign that the story grabbed your interest and therefore could be a good topic for a joke that a mass audience would enjoy.

Soon after I had that emotional reaction, a related question popped into my head: “Who wants to eat cicadas anyway?” Asking oneself an obvious question suggested by the topic is the first step in my Punch Line Maker #6: State the obvious about the topic.

Punch Line Maker #6 isn’t used very often but it seemed like it would work here. So I continued with it and wrote a punch line based on the obvious answer to my obvious question. The obvious answer was “Nobody wants to eat cicadas.”

But wording the joke this way would have been too direct: “Why did they need to say that? Nobody wants to eat cicadas.” So I used my Joke Maximizer #11–Don’t be too on-the-nose–and instead came up with a more indirect way of expressing the same idea in the punch line.

Note that I could have used my Joke Maximizer #6–Make the punch line parallel–and worded the punch line something like “Was anybody really looking for a reason to avoid eating cicadas?” But my Joke Maximizer #4 is “Make everything clear,” and that wording didn’t seem quite as clear as the final version I went with.

Finally, I added the angle “Was that really necessary?” to get the audience into the frame of mind to immediately understand the punch line.