The joke:
A New Jersey man broke a Guinness World Record for the largest Ouija board. When he heard about the board, Hunter Biden was like, “How much do they pay and can I be on it?
How I wrote it:
I focused on this news item because “Guinness World Record” and “Ouija board” each seemed to have many associations that might spark a punch line.
At the time, a bigger news story involved Hunter Biden, son of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. Hunter got paid a lot of money to serve as a board member for a Ukrainian gas company, even though his qualifications were, apparently, minimal.
So when I read “Ouija board,” the association “board” reminded me of Hunter Biden and I decided to use my Punch Line Maker #2: Link the topic to pop culture. I wrote a punch line based on Hunter’s mercenary reaction to hearing about the board.
I also used my Joke Maximizer #4–Make everything clear–in two ways. I repeated the word “board,” saying it again right before “Hunter Biden.” That way the audience would be sure to have in their minds the word that the punch line depends on.
And I had Hunter ask two questions about the board, to be sure the audience would know that he’s referring to a corporate board. If the punch line had ended with only one question from Hunter–“Can I be on it?”–the audience might have thought he wanted to physically stand on the Ouija board. And, confused, they wouldn’t have laughed.