Author Archives: Joe Toplyn

Joke About the Subway Lawsuit

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The joke:

Two California residents filed a lawsuit claiming that there is no tuna in Subway’s tuna sandwiches. If they win, they’ll get $10 million plus, for an extra $2.60, a Diet Coke and a bag of potato chips.

How I wrote it:

This news item caught my attention because I thought a mass audience could relate to it; I know I could. Plus “Subway” has associations that I thought I could use to create a punch line. So “Subway” became my first topic handle.

But my Punch Line Maker #1–Link two associations of the topic–requires that you pick two handles of the topic. “Tuna” seemed promising as a second handle, but in connection with “Subway” it didn’t seem as interesting as “lawsuit.” So I tried “lawsuit” for the second handle.

I brainstormed associations of “Subway” and landed on “Meal Deal,” which has the association “money.” “Lawsuit” also has the association “money.” So I decided to base my punch line on those two Californians getting the Meal Deal.

But I faced a structural problem: the Meal Deal involves getting something from Subway, whereas the lawsuit involves not getting some something from Subway, namely tuna.

I solved the problem by writing an angle about what the Californians will get if they win, which let me smoothly connect to my punch line about getting the Meal Deal.

I went online to confirm what the Meal Deal includes and how much it costs. Instead of writing “a soft drink and a side,” I used my Joke Maximizer #9–Get specific–and listed specific menu items.

When I named those menu items I also employed my Joke Maximizer #7–Use stop consonants, alliteration, and assonance. “A Diet Coke and a bag of potato chips” includes a whopping eleven stop consonants.

Joke About Long Lines for the Vaccine

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The joke:

People are desperate. They want to know if they’re eligible. They’re trying to get on the list, waiting in long lines, sleeping in their cars. They all want to get one before the supply runs out. Yes, I’m talking about Presidential pardons.

How I wrote it:

I got the idea for this joke while I read the newspaper at breakfast; yes, I get home delivery of a physical paper, to supplement all the news I read online.

On the front page was a story about how states were having problems distributing the Covid-19 vaccine. Right below that was a story about how President Trump was preparing a long list of people to pardon.

And a connection between those two adjacent stories popped into my head: the idea of people lining up to get something valuable. So I had the idea for a punch line.

I could have built out that idea into a shorter joke, something like “People are waiting in long lines to get the Covid-19 vaccine. The bad news is, the lines are even longer to get a pardon from President Trump.”

But I thought the joke would be more surprising, and funnier, if I extended the misdirection of the angle by exaggerating the lengths that desperate people were going to.

The finished joke felt like one that other writers might come up with. So I posted it on Twitter, Facebook, and this website around 9:30 am, hours before I usually post my daily joke.

Sure enough, later that day a Facebook friend alerted me to a New Yorker cartoon that, according to Google, appeared online a few hours after I had posted my joke.

Did that cartoonist swipe my idea? No. All creators of topical comedy see the same news and use the same techniques to write jokes. So it’s no surprise when two writers independently come up with the same one.

For more on that phenomenon, read how Seth Meyers Did Not Steal My Joke.

Joke About Biden’s Inauguration

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The joke:

The schedule is now set for Inauguration Day. And this is interesting: at the exact same time that Chief Justice John Roberts will be swearing in Joe Biden, Donald Trump will be swearing at Joe Biden.

How I wrote it:

I wanted to write a joke about the upcoming inauguration because it was a big story. But many aspects of it seemed unpromising for joke writing: the attack on the Capitol, the increased security, the possibility of additional violence.

So I brainstormed about the inauguration process itself. One of the associations that popped into my head was “swearing in,” and then its wordplay with “swearing at.” And I realized that my punch line could have Trump swearing at Biden.

That is, I only had a general idea of what my joke topic would be when I used my Punch line Maker #4–Find a play on words in the topic. And I still needed to write the topic.

The “swearing in / swearing at” wordplay suggested two events happening at the same time. So I wrote a topic that referred to the schedule for Inauguration Day.

Once I had that topic, I wrote an angle that emphasized the surprising nature of the coincidence I had invented: the two events will happen “at the exact same time.” A more surprising punch line is a funnier punch line.

I also used my Joke Maximizer #6–Make the punch line parallel–when I worded the Roberts/Biden part of the joke as much as possible like the Trump/Biden part. The parallelism would have been closer without the words “Chief Justice,” but I included them for clarity.

Joke About Trump’s Twitter Account

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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.

Joke About Hilaria Baldwin

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The joke:

It’s New Year’s Day. Or as Hilaria Baldwin said, “It’s New Year’s Day…No, wait a second, I mean, Es el Día de Año Nuevo.”

How I wrote it:

On Dave Letterman’s late-night shows we used to do a kind of desk piece consisting of jokes about how some topic would affect various celebrities. That’s probably why on New Year’s Day a desk piece idea popped into my head: “How Celebrities Are Celebrating the New Year.”

That led me to consider writing a joke using my Punch Line Maker #2–Link the topic to pop culture. In this case, the topic was “New Year’s Day” and the pop culture element would be some celebrity.

One celebrity who was very much in the news at the time was Alec Baldwin’s wife, Hilaria. She was being widely accused of faking her Spanish heritage and accent.

So to create a punch line, I decided to link “New Year’s Day” to an association of Hilaria Baldwin, namely “pretends to be Spanish.”

I decided that a good way to make that link would be to have Baldwin say “It’s New Year’s Day” in Spanish but be obviously pretending.

I got the Spanish translation from Google Translate. Even if the result isn’t exactly the way a real Spanish person would say it, I figured that’s okay because the whole point of the punch line is that Baldwin is only pretending to be Spanish.

To make it clear that Baldwin is pretending, I wrote the punch line so she would speak English and then awkwardly correct herself. I was tempted to have her flail around more in English, but instead followed the advice of my Joke Maximizer #1 to “Shorten as much as possible.”

Joke About Michael Jackson’s Ranch

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The joke:

Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch was just sold for $22 million. Per his wishes, the sale was handled by the real estate company Century Under-21.

How I wrote it:

I, along with many other comedy writers, wrote a lot of Michael Jackson jokes when he was alive. That’s because he had many vivid associations that could be used to create punch lines, like his sequined glove, his plastic surgery, and Bubbles the chimp.

Plus Jackson was such a huge star that any joking at his expense was acceptable to a mass audience because it was “punching up.”

But writing a joke that connects Jackson to the sex abuse of children is potentially tricky. He’s still beloved by many people, plus he died an untimely death. And were those accusations of sex abuse ever proven? I don’t remember.

But a punch line doesn’t have to be factually true. For a punch line to work, most people just have to accept it as true. And I thought that most people would accept the idea that, at the very least, Jackson really liked young boys.

So I decided it was okay for me to use my Punch Line Maker #1–Link two associations of the topic–and associate the topic handle “Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch” with “underage children.” The other topic handle, “sold,” I associated with “real estate company.” Then I linked those two associations in the phony name “Century Under-21.”

I included the descriptor “the real estate company” to make sure the audience would immediately realize what company I was talking about; “Century 21” was also a fairly well-known department store chain.

I also added the phrase “per his wishes” to the angle of the joke, so the audience would immediately connect “under-21” to Jackson. If they didn’t make that connection, the joke wouldn’t work.

Joke About a Fight at Walmart

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The joke:

A big crowd watched two women fighting over a video game console at a Walmart in North Carolina. Two women in a Walmart fighting over a video game console…or as they call it in North Carolina, the Annual Christmas Pageant.

How I wrote it:

I used my Punch Line Maker #1: Link two associations of the topic. But in doing so I relied on two handles of the topic that may not be immediately obvious.

The first handle was the whole brawl in the Walmart, including all its details. When I read this news item in mid-December I scornfully associated the brawl with the idea that it was “a typical Christmas scene.”

The second handle of the topic was “Christmas,” which wasn’t explicitly mentioned in the news item. Still, “Christmas” was an element of the story because the brawl clearly occurred during the women’s holiday shopping. And one association of the handle “Christmas” is “Christmas pageant.”

So I created a punch line that links the brawl to Christmas through the idea of an annual Christmas pageant.

Then I used my Joke Maximizer #1: Shorten as much as possible. I took out all the details in the news item that weren’t necessary to make the joke work: I omitted the facts that the Walmart was near Charlotte, that the video game console was a PlayStation 5, and that a video of the incident had gone viral.

But I added the detail that a crowd watched the fight. I thought it would help guide the audience for the joke toward the punch line’s idea that the Walmart customers were watching a performance.

Even after I shortened the topic it still included a lot of details. So I wrote an angle that repeated the most important ones, to clarify that the punch line referred to the whole brawl and not just one or two details of it.

Joke About Carrie Ann Inaba

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The joke:

Today “Dancing with the Stars” judge Carrie Ann Inaba said she has tested positive for Covid-19. More specifically, she said she scored a Covid-6, a Covid-7, and another Covid-6 from Derek Hough.

How I wrote it:

Testing positive for Covid-19 can lead to death, of course. So I read deeper into the story to make sure Carrie Ann Inaba was doing okay before I proceeded. I didn’t want to write a joke that would make people feel too guilty to laugh.

When I read the news item my mind quickly went to my Punch Line Maker #1: Link two associations of the topic.

That’s because one of the stronger associations I have for the topic handle “Dancing with the Stars” is those number scores that the judges hold up. And an obvious association of the other topic handle, “Covid-19,” is the number 19.

So I decided to write a punch line that links “19” to the scores that Carrie Ann Inaba supposedly received for a performance on the show.

I don’t watch the show regularly so I had to do a little research. I didn’t want fans of the show to be distracted by any incorrect details on their way to the punch line.

I was happy to confirm that the show usually has three judges. That meant I could take advantage of my Joke Maximizer #10–Use the Rule of Three–by constructing my punch line as a list of three scores.

I wanted the last score to be a little more surprising than the other two scores, because having a surprise at the end is how the Rule of Three works. So I attributed the last score to the judge whose name I thought would be the most recognizable. He’s been on the cover of “People Magazine,” hasn’t he?

Joke About the Holidays and Covid-19

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The joke:

The CDC is really being strict about the holidays because of the coronavirus. They even changed that Christmas carol about the reindeer. Now Vixen is Vaccine, Comet is Covid, Prancer is Pfizer, and no one can see Rudolph’s nose because it’s covered by a mask.

How I wrote it:

This joke started with the punch line instead of the more usual way–with the topic.

As I pondered how the pandemic might affect the holidays I noticed that “Covid” sounded sort of like “Comet,” one of the reindeer in the Christmas song “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” So I decided to write a joke using my Punch Line Maker #4: Find a play on words in the topic.

My Joke Maximizer #2 is “End on the laugh trigger,” so my instinct was to end the joke on “Covid.” But an internet search of the real lyrics revealed that “Comet” doesn’t end a line, it starts one. That meant that I couldn’t structure the punch line as a list of actual reindeer names from the song followed by “Covid.”

But as I studied the actual reindeer names, two more wordplay links between associations of “coronavirus” and “reindeer” occurred to me. The resulting fake names seemed funny so I decided to include them too.

However, that meant that my punch line would be a list of three reindeer names, all funny. So I couldn’t apply my Joke Maximizer #10–Use the Rule of Three–which requires a list of two unfunny items followed by third, surprisingly funny, item.

To end the joke with the funny surprise that I couldn’t achieve with the Rule of Three, I added a fourth laugh trigger that doesn’t depend on wordplay. Instead it links two associations of “coronavirus” and “reindeer” in a surprisingly visual way.

Once I had my punch line I wrote a factually true topic that included the handles I needed–“holidays” and “coronavirus”–to set up the punch line.

And I wrote an angle that mentions “Christmas carol” and “reindeer.” That way the audience would immediately identify the names in the punch line as coming from the “Rudolph” song.

Joke About Darwin’s Notebooks

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The joke:

Cambridge University says that two notebooks written by Charles Darwin with his ideas about evolution have been stolen. Witnesses described a suspect who started walking on all fours, then walked in a crouch, and finally walked upright.

How I wrote it:

I thought I could write a joke about this topic pretty easily because the two topic handles–“Charles Darwin” and “stolen”–seemed to have enough associations to link into punch lines.

I started with my Punch Line Maker #4: “Find a play on words in the topic.” I tried using wordplay to link one association of “Charles Darwin,” namely “evolution,” to an association of “stolen,” namely “theory of the crime.” The result was a joke that ended something like, “At first the police thought it was an inside job but their theory evolved.”

But I didn’t think that joke would be clear enough because “their theory evolved” seemed a little too far away from “theory of evolution.”

Then I started wondering whether “theory of evolution” was even the correct term. So I Googled it. When I did, this well-known illustration caught my eye:

And that illustration pointed me toward my Punch Line Maker #5: Visualize the topic. I wrote a punch line that links that pictorial representation of “evolution” to an association of “stolen,” “eyewitness description.”

Even though that illustration depicts five walking creatures, I only described three of them in my punch line because of my Joke Maximizer #10: Use the Rule of Three.

My original topic sentence didn’t include the word “evolution” so I went back and added it. That’s because the audience needs that concept firmly in their heads in order to make the mental connection to the walking creature illustration.