The joke:
Disney is closing its immersive Star Wars-themed hotel in Orlando. Apparently they may have gone a little too far with the Star Wars theme: hotel guests kept finding their bathtub drains clogged with Wookiee hair.
How I wrote it:
I thought I could get a good joke out of this topic because it has two handles–“Star Wars” and “hotel”–that have lots of associations that could be linked to create a punch line.
The topic raised the question in my mind “Why are they closing their Star Wars-themed hotel?” That is, I started the joke-writing process with my Punch Line Maker #3: Ask a question about the topic.
To answer that question in a surprising way, and thus get a punch line, I decided to come up with a specific problem that the Star Wars theme could have caused at the hotel.
To do that, I first brainstormed problems that a hotel stay could be associated with. As I did, I remembered the time I checked into a low-budget motel and found a hair in the bathtub that the cleaner had missed. Exaggerating that one hair into a drain full of hair, I arrived at a problem that would really repel hotel guests.
Next I brainstormed associations of “Star Wars” in search of a hairy character. Chewbacca quickly came to mind, but “Wookiee” (I checked the spelling) sounded a little funnier. And that’s how I arrived at the basic idea for my punch line, a drain full of Wookiee hair.
As I chose the words for the punch line, I had in mind my Joke Maximizer #7: Use stop consonants, alliteration, and assonance. Starting with the T in “hotel,” the finished punch line has 13 stop consonants (B, D, G, K, P, and T), which help make the joke as funny as it can be.
I also used my Joke Maximizer #4: Make everything clear. I did that by repeating “Star Wars” in the angle, to make sure the audience would immediately remember what “Wookiee” means.
You know who was particularly sad to see the closing of a Star Wars hotel? The laundry staff. For some reason, a Star War hotel never has any stains on the sheets.