The joke:
Krispy Kreme will give you a free glazed doughnut every day this year if you’ve received a Covid-19 vaccination. It’s all part of their new Covid promotion: “Fattening the Curve.”
How I wrote it:
This news item drew my attention because it has two topic handles, “doughnut” and “Covid-19 vaccination,” with plenty of associations that I could feed into my Punch Line Maker #1: Link two associations of the topic.
Also, the news item gave me the opportunity to write a joke about a huge and ongoing news story–the pandemic–without highlighting any of its ugly details.
One of the associations of “doughnut” is “fattening.” One of the associations of “Covid-19 vaccination” is “flattening the curve.” To create the punch line, I linked those two associations by substituting “fattening” for “flattening,” taking advantage of the wordplay between the two words.
To make sure the audience immediately got the connection between “fattening the curve” and the doughnut promotion, I made sure to include details in the topic that emphasize how potentially fattening the promotion is, details like “glazed” and “every day this year.”
Some people don’t like puns and other wordplay. But wordplay can be funny as long as it’s part of a joke that’s well-constructed, like this one. I expand on that point in this article, “Why Do People Not Like Puns.”
I call the type of wordplay punch line in this joke a substitution punch line. If you’re teaching computers how to crack jokes, as I am, jokes with substitution punch lines are some of the low-hanging fruit.
For details on my computational humor invention, which centers on wordplay jokes, read my patent here.