The joke:
Scientists now think that Covid-19 may have escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China. As evidence, they point to a cell in the lab where there’s a blanket almost covering a dummy coronavirus head made of papier-mache and hair clippings.
How I wrote it:
I used my Punch Line Maker #1: Link two associations of the topic. “Covid-19” was an obvious choice for one topic handle because it’s responsible for a lot of the topic’s newsworthiness.
But the choice of the second topic handle wasn’t so obvious. “China” was a possibility but, in connection with “Covid-19,” it doesn’t add much to the newsworthiness. A word that adds more is “escaped.” So I chose “escaped” as my second topic handle.
The verb “escaped” is an unusual choice because topic handles are almost always nouns or noun phrases. Still, the word seemed to have a lot of potentially useful associations, so I went with it.
Brainstorming associations of “escaped,” I visualized an escaping prison inmate placing a handmade dummy head of himself in his bed to fool the guards. Grafting a coronavirus into that scenario, I had my punch line.
To describe the escape scenario and make my punch line completely clear I needed a lot of words. But I wanted to adhere to my Joke Maximizer #5–“Don’t telegraph the punch line.” And the longer the punch line was, the more likely the audience would be to get ahead of it. If the audience predicts a punch line, they won’t be surprised by it and they won’t laugh.
I minimized the potential problem of telegraphing by moving the most revealing details of the image I was painting as close to the end of the joke as possible.
I also prolonged my misdirection of the audience by using the phrase “a cell in the lab,” which could also refer to a biological cell.
Thank you for explanation… but this one didn’t work for me. I didn’t even get the connection to a prison break until you explained it. You did put in “cell”, but that just confused me. The papier-mache also threw me off – I pictured a model of the coronavirus, the hair being the “crowns” sticking out of the virus that we’ve all seen on TV. I also didn’t know that people in prison built P-M heads and hair clippings to escape. Maybe being explicit about a “bed” and being more straightforward with the dummy they found would have helped.
Either way though, it’s instructive, so thanks!
Thanks for reading it.
Yes, deciding whether an audience will make the associations necessary to get a joke is a judgment call the writer makes. So all the writer can do is take a guess and then try out the joke.
That reminds me of what a speaking mentor once told me – How do you know what’s funny? The audience (I don’t mean me) will tell you. Thanks for putting your stuff out there. I just saw your book – I can’t wait to read it!
Thanks! My book covers all the techniques I mention in these Joke Writing Workshop posts, and much more.