Author: Joe Toplyn
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Joke About Elvis Robbing A Winery
Setup: Police: Masked Man in Elvis Wig Robbed Tasting Room at Winery Punch Line: Understandably, the locals are all shook up. Writer: Jay Stone Joe’s analysis of the joke
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Joke About Civil War Cannons
Setup: Three Civil War cannons removed from South Carolina River Punch Line: Their cannons were in the river? No wonder the South lost. Writer: Maria Wojciechowski Joe’s analysis of the joke
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Joke About Astronomer Geoff Marcy
Setup: Astronomer Geoff Marcy is leaving Berkeley in wake of sexual harassment scandal. Punch Line: Sounds like he was reaching for more than the stars. Writer: Lina Jane Joe’s analysis of the joke
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Joke About Paul Prudhomme
Setup: Paul Prudhomme, Cajun Chef and Inventor of Turducken, Dies Punch Line: He’s going to be buried in a body-bag inside of a coffin inside of a sarcophagus. Writer: Jon Valley Joe’s analysis of the joke
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How to Create a New Comedy/Talk Show
You have a host. Your assignment is to build a new comedy/talk show around him or her. How do you even begin to do that? Recently The New York Times went behind the scenes to give a glimpse into how James Corden and his staff are creating their version of Late Late Show, premiering on…
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The Reader’s Digest? Cool!
[Possibly NSFW because of the photo of Kim K.] I had just posted this joke on Twitter: Yes, sometimes I tweet jokes about Kim Kardashian’s butt. Which is one reason I was surprised when my friend Phil told me that he’d seen one of my tweets in the Reader’s Digest. He mailed me his copy…
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How to Write a Funny Caption
Say you want to write a funny caption for this cartoon, which was the subject of Caption Contest #447 in The New Yorker. You write funny captions for uncaptioned cartoons the same way you’d write jokes about a Found Photo, which is an unaltered photo that wasn’t originally intended to be funny. Examples of Found…
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How to Write a Desk Piece
That’s an example of a joke in a Desk Piece, a type of short-form comedy that’s popular on many comedy/talk shows. A Desk Piece is a segment of fully-scripted comedy that the host performs by himself while sitting at his desk. Here’s how I wrote that joke. The process was very similar to that of…
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Why We Laugh at Late-Night TV
What makes people laugh? Scholars and theologians have been trying to answer that question since the dawn of comedy. Now Peter McGraw has a theory, the benign violation theory, which he discusses in his entertaining new book The Humor Code, co-written with Joel Warner. The benign violation theory of humor says that, as Peter puts it, “Laughter only…
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How to Pick a Good News Item for Writing Jokes
Some news items are easier to write multiple jokes about than others. Monologue writers like those news items because cranking out several jokes about the same news item takes less time than hunting down other promising news items and then writing jokes about those. So what makes a news item a good candidate for multiple…