The joke:
A Japanese cryptocurrency exchange was hacked and lost 3.5 billion yen worth of virtual money. To put that into perspective, that’s no money.
How I wrote it:
Cryptocurrencies seem to me to be such a sketchy financial vehicle that my first thought on reading this news item was something like, “Is virtual money even real?”
That thought led me to use Punch Line Maker #6: State the obvious about the topic. PLM #6 starts with the writer asking an obvious question suggested by the topic, which I had already done. And I assumed that most other people would have the same question.
The next step in PLM #6 is to write a punch line based on the obvious answer to that obvious question. I thought that most of my audience would agree with the answer that virtual money isn’t real money, so I wrote the punch line “that’s no money.”
Finally, I added the angle “To put that into perspective…” I thought it would mislead the audience into thinking that the rest of the sentence was going to tell them more about the huge size of the sum of stolen money. That mislead would make the punch line more surprising, and therefore funnier.
The original news story reported “the loss of 3.5 billion yen, or $32 million, worth of virtual money.” For my joke I quoted the amount of money in yen instead of dollars because I thought that made the virtual money sound even sketchier.