The joke:
Congratulations to Kim Kardashian, who just passed California’s First-Year Law Students’ Examination. You can tell she didn’t have a cheat sheet on her because during the exam she posted a nude selfie.
How I wrote it:
This news item caught my attention because it surprised me: I wouldn’t have expected that reality TV star Kim Kardashian could pass what must be a difficult exam.
Also, as a topic handle Kim Kardashian has some associations that I thought would be useful in writing a joke. That is, I thought I could use this news item with my Punch Line Maker #1–Link two associations of the topic.
But some associations of Kim Kardashian that I’ve used in the past were hard to link to the other topic handle, “First-Year Law Students’ Examination.” For example, how could I link “excessive bikini waxing” to a law exam? And I couldn’t easily link “not very smart” or “doesn’t do any real work” to the exam. That’s because she did pass the exam, which must have required some brains and studying.
Then I thought of the Kim Kardashian association “takes nude selfies” and asked myself how I could link that to taking the exam. And it occurred to me that one association of “taking a difficult exam” is “using a cheat sheet.” That’s when I realized that I could link those two associations by basing a punch line on the idea that a nude selfie would prove she wasn’t hiding a cheat sheet.
Because my Joke Maximizer #2 is “End on the laugh trigger,” I worded the joke to put “nude selfie” at the very end.
Finally, the original news item called the exam the “baby bar exam,” which is apparently how it’s usually referred to. But I used the full name of the exam to make the topic as clear as possible, per my Joke Maximizer #4.