The joke:
To cut down on waste, a new ordinance in Los Angeles will ban free ketchup packets unless diners ask for them first. And it gets better. If diners want salt, they’ll have to settle for the sweat dripping off the fry cook’s forehead.
How I wrote it:
The original news item seemed promising for a joke because it had a few fertile-sounding topic handles.
But the item was a little too complicated, referring to mustard packets, climate change, and restaurants with 26 or more employees.
So I shortened and simplified the news item to arrive at the topic sentence you see here; I kept only the words I thought would be necessary to make the joke work well.
I then turned to my Punch Line Maker #3: Ask a question about the topic. The question I asked myself was, “What happens if diners ask for some other condiment that comes in packets?”
I thought about associations of “condiment in packets” and came up with “salt,” which I associated with “sweat.”
So I decided to answer my question by creating a punch line that links “sweat” to an association of the topic handle “diners,” namely “a restaurant employee.”
But instead of going with a generic punch line like “They’ll have to settle for some restaurant employee’s sweat,” I used my Joke Maximizer #9: Get specific. I picked a restaurant employee who might perspire a lot, added details, and wrote “the sweat dripping off the fry cook’s forehead.”
That punch line phrase also takes advantage of my Joke Maximizer #7: Use stop consonants, alliteration, and assonance; the phrase has six stop consonants.
Finally I added the angle “And it gets better.” I felt it would guide the audience smoothly from the topic to the punch line, which describes another waste reduction measure.