Tag Archives: Late Show

Joke About Squirrels and the Coronavirus

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The joke:

In New York City, there’s a new field hospital for coronavirus patients in Central Park. It has the squirrels so concerned that they’re rubbing Purell on their nuts.

How I wrote it:

This news item caught my eye because it had to do with Central Park. More on that later.

To write the joke I used my Punch Line Maker #1: Link two associations of the topic. One topic handle, “coronavirus,” has the association “Purell.” The other topic handle, “Central Park,” has the association “squirrels.”

My punch line links those two associations by stating that the squirrels are rubbing Purell on either their food or their genitals, depending on how you interpret the wordplay.

This joke is a tribute to the Central Park squirrel jokes that Dave Letterman often told in his “Late Show” monologue. This joke is typical: “It was so hot in Central Park today, I saw a squirrel rubbing sunblock on his nuts.”

For more of Dave’s squirrel jokes, here’s a short video of celebrities retelling some of them:

Part of the fun of Dave’s squirrel jokes is that “nuts,” in the context of the joke, can often only mean “genitals.” For example, nuts such as acorns don’t need sunblock no matter how hot it is.

But I like the fact that in my joke, the wordplay punch line really does have a double meaning. In this pandemic, people are not only rubbing Purell on parts of their body, but also on objects they touch frequently. So in the case of anthropomorphic squirrels, those objects could conceivably include the food they’ve gathered.

How to Write a Desk Piece

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“Children grow up so fast these days. That’s the reasoning behind this latest addition to a beloved series of children’s books. It’s [HOLDS UP FAKE BOOK] Curious George and the hole in the wall of the girls’ locker room.”

Curious George and the hole in the wall of the girls' locker room

That’s an example of a joke in a Desk Piece, a type of short-form comedy that’s popular on many comedy/talk shows. A Desk Piece is a segment of fully-scripted comedy that the host performs by himself while sitting at his desk.

 

Here’s how I wrote that joke. The process was very similar to that of writing a topical monologue joke, a process I cover in detail in my book Comedy Writing for Late-Night TV.

 

I started with the topic of the Desk Piece. The topic is typically a collection of things in a particular category, in this case “New Books.” Next I brainstormed a long list of angles off that topic, that is, types of real books. Here’s a partial list of those angles:

 

stacks of bookscookbooks  *  dictionaries  *  puzzle books  * coffee table books  *  The Lord of the Rings  *   thesauruses  *  novels  *  atlases  *  children’s books  *  Mark Twain  * celebrity memoirs  *  paperbacks  *   etiquette books  *  Curious George  *  biographies  *  encyclopedias  *  guidebooks  *  pop-up books  *  how-to books  *  photography books  *  manuals

 

To create the punch line I chose one angle–Curious George–and used my Punch Line Maker #3 on it, asking the question “What might a curious person do?” I answered that question using a surprisingly unwholesome association of “curious,” which is “spy on people.”

 

Finally I used my Joke Maximizer #9 (“Get specific”), devising a very specific Peeping George scenario, and arrived at the punch line: “Curious George and the hole in the wall of the girls’ locker room.”

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“New Books” is what I call a Graphic/Prop Piece, one of the seven types of Desk Pieces I analyze in my own new book, Comedy Writing for Late-Night TV.

 

A footnote: I wrote that Curious George joke for Late Show with David Letterman in May 1998 but you’d never know it. It’s an example of evergreen comedy, comedy that has a long shelf life, usually because it’s not based on something topical but on a more lasting pop culture phenomenon.

 

If you’re preparing a writing sample to submit to a comedy/talk show, include a generous portion of evergreen comedy. That way your submission won’t seem too dated if it winds up sitting on the credenza of some head writer for months before it’s read.