The joke:
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has finalized his divorce. And this is interesting…Amazon says that customers who liked the Bezos divorce also liked Nicolas Cage’s divorce.
How I wrote it:
The original news item attracted my attention because it had several possible handles with lots of associations, like “Amazon,” “divorce,” “$150 billion,” and “the richest person in the world.”
After I settled on “Amazon” and “divorce” as the handles to base a punch line on, I trimmed away all excess verbiage in the news item to get my topic sentence; that’s because my Joke Maximizer #1 is “Shorten as much as possible.”
The handle “Amazon” is associated with, among many other things, its feature “Customers who bought this item also bought…”
The handle “divorce” is associated with other well-known people who got divorced recently, one of whom is Nicolas Cage (as I was reminded when I googled recent celebrity divorces).
To get my punch line, I blended “Customers who bought this item also bought…” with “Nicolas Cage’s divorce,” modifying as few words as possible so the association with Amazon’s recommendation feature would be clear.
Then I reinforced that association by adding the angle “And this is interesting…Amazon says that…”
I was pleased that “Nicolas Cage,” besides being an amusingly offbeat celebrity, also happens to have two “K” sounds in his name. That let me employ my Joke Maximizer #7, which is “Use stop consonants, alliteration, and assonance.”