The joke:
In Germany over the weekend, burglars broke through the wall of a toy store and stole dozens of Lego sets. Luckily they left behind the 12,000-piece Lego Ultimate Collector Series Wall Hole Repair Set.
How I wrote it:
I thought this news item would make a good topic for a joke because it has handles–“burglars,” “toy store,” “Lego”–that have plenty of associations. And I often use my Punch Line Maker #1–Link two associations of the topic–to create a punch line.
But the phrase “burglars broke through the wall of a toy store” called to my mind an image of that happening. So I turned instead to my Punch Line Maker #5–Visualize the topic.
I visualized a pile of bricks cascading to the floor of the toy store as the burglars broke through. Then, because the topic also mentions Lego, I adjusted that mental image to include a pile of Lego bricks. That’s how I arrived at the idea for my punch line, that the hole in the wall could be repaired using Legos.
But I didn’t just write a generic punch line like “luckily they left behind enough Legos to repair the hole in the wall.” Instead I used my Joke Maximizer #9–Get specific. I did some research online to come up with a detailed name of a Lego set designed for that particular repair task; I took the phrase “Ultimate Collector Series” from the Lego “Star Wars” sets.
I also used my Joke Maximizer #8–Wildly exaggerate–when I specified 12,000 pieces. That’s considerably more than the largest number of pieces I saw for any real Lego set. But it’s not such a ridiculously large number that it diverts the audience’s attention from the laugh trigger.