The joke:
Hundreds of articles of clothing that belonged to “Jeopardy” host Alex Trebek are being donated to charity. The charity says if you’re the first one to grab a suit, you can buy it for $200, $400, $600, $800, or $1000.
How I wrote it:
This news item caught my attention because the two topic handles–“clothing” and “Jeopardy”–seemed to have enough associations to link into a good punch line.
One link came to me pretty quickly: “clothing” is associated with “buying clothing,” which has the sub-association “money.” And “money” is also associated with “Jeopardy.” So I thought I could create a punch line based on the dollar amounts of the game categories: $200, $400, $600, $800, and $1000.
But the logic of the joke isn’t completely solid: When you correctly answer a question on “Jeopardy” you get money, but when you buy a suit, you give money.
So to help the audience get past that bump in logic, I added to the angle another link between “buying clothing” and “Jeopardy,” which is “being the first to claim an item.” With that addition, I thought the joke would be clear enough that the slight defect in logic wouldn’t hurt it.
It appears that the real charity to which the clothing was donated won’t actually be selling it. But if I didn’t mention that fact in the joke, I figured the audience wouldn’t know.
Alex Trebek was a beloved figure in entertainment, so I briefly wondered whether using his name in a joke would offend a lot of people. But I decided that this joke was inoffensive because the only thing it says about Trebek is that he’s closely associated with “Jeopardy.” And who could disagree with that?