Monthly Archives: April 2022

Joke About Hot Glue Guns

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The joke:

Dollar Tree is recalling more than a million hot glue guns because they can malfunction. And some people are pretty angry about it. In fact, Martha Stewart said, “You can have my hot glue gun when you pry it from my cold, dead hands that I’ve hot-glued it to.”

How I wrote it:

As soon as I read this news item I associated the topic handle “hot glue guns” with crafting enthusiast Martha Stewart. That is, I decided I could use my Punch Line Maker #2: Link the topic to pop culture.

Exaggerating for comic effect (as per my Joke Maximizer #8), I thought that she’d be really angry if a company tried to take away her beloved hot glue gun. And I guessed that I could write a funny punch line in which she expressed that anger.

Then I associated “guns” in “hot glue guns” with the familiar NRA slogan about gun enthusiasts having their guns taken away. So to create my punch line I just substituted “hot glue gun” in the slogan for “gun.”

But having Stewart say only “You can have my hot glue gun when you pry it from my cold, dead hands” didn’t feel like quite enough to me. Maybe that’s because the slogan is so long and familiar that I thought the audience would be able to predict it based on its first few words. That is, the long punch line itself would violate my Joke Maximizer #5: Don’t telegraph the punch line.

To solve that problem, I ended the punch line with a final surprise by adding the part about hot-gluing the hot glue gun to her hands.

Finally I added the angle “And some people are pretty angry about it.” That way the audience would be in the proper mindset to quickly understand the meaning of Stewart’s quote, and of the punch line.

Joke About Will Smith’s Slap

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The joke:

Yesterday “King Richard” Oscar-winner Will Smith apologized to Chris Rock for slapping him in the face at the Academy Awards. Smith also apologized to Venus and Serena Williams for not following-through on his forehand.

How I wrote it:

I wanted to write a joke about this news item because it featured a topic handle, The Slap, that a lot of people were interested in. The handle also had a lot of associations that I could turn into punch lines.

Because the video of The Slap was so memorable, I gravitated to my Punch Line Maker #5: Visualize the topic. I thought about Smith slapping Rock and brainstormed about what that slapping motion resembled.

As I did, I remembered that Smith, another topic handle, had won an Oscar for portraying the father of two tennis superstars. I also remembered that tennis players are associated with the forehand stroke. When I realized that Smith’s slapping motion resembled a tennis forehand, I decided to link those two motions in a punch line.

To make the punch line work, I did some editing to my rough draft. My Joke Maximizer #6 is “Make the punch line parallel.” So I had Smith apologizing to people in the punch line for something he did, the same way he apologized to someone in the topic for something he did.

My Joke Maximizer #4 is “Make everything clear.” So I added to the topic a reference to “King Richard.” I wanted to make sure the audience immediately got the connection between the Williams sisters in the punch line and Will Smith.

I realized that my punch line implies that Smith wasn’t very serious in his apology to Rock. But I thought my audience would accept that implication. That’s because Smith apologized to other people at the Oscars, but not Rock.