The joke:
This week the “Star Wars” series “Obi-Wan Kenobi” premieres on Disney Plus. But before you get too excited, there’s also a series with Jar Jar Binks coming to Disney Minus.
How I wrote it:
I decided to write a joke about this news item because the topic seemed pretty fertile: the topic handles– Obi-Wan Kenobi and Disney Plus–have many associations I thought I could link into punch lines to use my Punch Line Maker #1: Link two associations of the topic.
The first associations that occurred to me for Obi-Wan Kenobi were other well-known “Star Wars” characters. My attention focused on Jar Jar Binks because I thought I could use his sub-association “widely loathed” to create a punch line.
More specifically, I asked myself the question, “Where would a series about a widely loathed character appear?” Luckily, I was able to change only one word of the other topic handle, Disney Plus, to answer that question in a punchy and surprising way.
The joke might have worked without the angle “But before you get too excited.” But I included those words to be sure the audience immediately got the negative connotation of my punch line “Disney Minus.”
I also added the phrase “the ‘Star Wars’ series” to the topic. I wanted to make sure that even casual fans would know who Obi-Wan Kenobi is without thinking too much about it.
And I used my Joke Maximizer #6–Make the punch line parallel: I worded the punch line so it has the same “series/character/streaming service” structure as the topic.