The joke:
Reports say that production of the upcoming NBC series “Ultimate Slip ‘N Slide” was halted after an outbreak of “explosive diarrhea” on the set. But why? Isn’t a show called “Ultimate Slip ‘N Slide” the perfect place for explosive diarrhea?
How I wrote it:
This story caught my attention because a number of news outlets covered it. Plus it’s really disgusting.
The phrase “explosive diarrhea” called to my mind a vivid mental picture. So I decided to use my Punch Line Maker #5: Visualize the topic.
My next step was to form a different, exaggerated perspective on that vivid mental picture. I did so by considering the title of that NBC series and imagining people slipping ‘n’ sliding on all that diarrhea.
To turn that exaggerated perspective into a punch line, I took the advice of my Punch Line Maker #6–State the obvious about the topic. If people were slipping ‘n’ sliding around on diarrhea, wouldn’t they obviously fit right into a show called “Ultimate Slip ‘N Slide?” And I had my punch line.
Before sending my joke out into the world, I asked myself whether it was so disgusting that my audience wouldn’t accept it and wouldn’t laugh.
But I figured that if multiple news outlets had decided that their audience would accept a story about “explosive diarrhea,” then most of my audience would probably accept a not-particularly-graphic joke about the story.
And I remembered this advice about doing edgy comedy that writer/director Mel Brooks said he once received from John Calley, then head of production at Warner Bros.: “If you’re going to go up to the bell, ring it.”
I had decided to go up to the bell, which was the news story about diarrhea. So I rang that bell by doing the sort of disgusting joke that the diarrhea story was made for.