The joke:
A worker who visited Google’s headquarters has been diagnosed with measles. And apparently it’s spreading. Now the Google logo has 37 red Os.
How I wrote it:
The original news headline that caught my eye was something like “Measles reported at Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters.”
The two most promising topic handles seemed to be “Google” and “measles,” because each of them has many associations and because “Silicon Valley” didn’t seem to be as distinctive and interesting a place for measles as “Google.”
I left out the unimportant “Silicon Valley” detail to shorten the topic but added the detail about the worker who visited Google. It was factual and I thought it made the topic more vivid and credible, but because it isn’t very important to the joke, I made sure it came at the beginning; Joke Maximizer #3 is “Backload the topic.”
Once I had my two topic handles, I plugged them into Punch Line Maker #1: Link two associations of the topic. One association of “Google” is those two Os in its logo. One association of “measles” is “red spots.”
I linked those two associations with a punch line that created a mental image of the Google logo with red spots instead of Os.
Then I boosted the number of Os to 37 because measles rashes usually have more than two spots and because Joke Maximizer #8 is “Wildly exaggerate.”