The joke:
Yesterday Twitter suspended the account of President Trump. He responded by launching his own version of Snapchat–Crapchat.
How I wrote it:
The biggest news story at the time was the storming of the Capitol building, but that didn’t lend itself easily to joke writing. So instead I chose for a topic a related news story that was almost as big.
The topic about Twitter suspending Trump suggested the question “What will he do about that?” That is, I gravitated toward my Punch Line Maker #3: Ask a question about the topic.
To answer that question, and create a punch line, I thought of associations of the two handles of the topic. As I did so, I had in mind the possibility of linking two associations using wordplay.
One handle, “Twitter,” is associated with other popular social media sites. As an aid to brainstorming, I looked up a list of them online.
The other handle, “President Trump,” has as an association “his tweets.” I mentally gauged how a mass audience now feels about those tweets and decided most people would be okay associating them with something like “garbage.”
Then, to get my punch line, I linked my list of social media sites to my list of synonyms for “garbage” by blending “Snapchat” and “crap.”
I debated about whether to include “Snapchat” in the angle. Without it, I thought the wordplay in the punch line might not be clear. With it, I thought the punch line might be too on-the-nose. I opted for clarity.
As a bonus, my Joke Maximizer #7 advises using stop consonants, and “Crapchat” has three of them.