The joke:
It’s Earth Day 2021, and President Biden is taking deforestation very seriously. This morning he looked in the mirror and made a solemn pledge to plant 100 new hair plugs.
How I wrote it:
I chose Earth Day as a joke topic because holidays tend to have a lot of associations that can be used to assemble a punch line.
To help in brainstorming associations, I Googled “how to celebrate Earth Day.” I planned to use my Punch Line Maker #2: Link the topic to pop culture. So I asked myself whether one of the associations of the topic handle “Earth Day” suggested a celebrity in some unexpected way.
“Picking up trash” didn’t suggest anybody. For example, I couldn’t think of a celebrity who had started dating anybody who might be described as “trash.”
“Reducing use of plastic” suggested some celebrity refraining from having more cosmetic surgery. But I couldn’t think of the right celebrity; singer Cher seemed overused as a plastic surgery punch line.
Then I saw Earth Day references to deforestation and planting trees. I associated those in an unexpected way with thinning hair and hair plugs, which I then linked to President Biden.
Although I’ve seen hundreds of jokes about Trump’s hair, I can’t remember seeing any about Biden’s hair. So I did another Google search and confirmed that Biden had, in fact, had hair plugs implanted. I wanted to be sure that most of my audience would accept that association as true.
Now that I had a punch line about Biden planting new hair plugs, I edited my topic and my angle to guide my audience smoothly toward it. I added “President Biden” and “deforestation” to the topic.
I also added “This morning he looked in the mirror” to the angle, to make it clear that Biden pledged to plant the hair plugs in his own scalp and not in somebody else’s.