The joke:
In NC, police at a shopping center arrested a man on Black Friday who was sitting in a car naked. Police said the naked man reminded them of Small Business Saturday.
How I wrote it:
When I read this fertile news item I thought, “There has to be a joke in there somewhere.” The reason I thought that is because the handles “Black Friday” and “naked man” each have a lot of associations.
To write the joke I started with Punch Line Maker #1: Link two associations of the topic. The handle “Black Friday” has as one association “Small Business Saturday.”
As I brainstormed associations of the other handle, “naked man,” I borrowed a technique from my Punch Line Maker #5 and visualized the topic. I formed a mental picture of a naked man sitting in a car, noticed his penis, and imagined it as exaggeratedly, humorously, small.
I got lucky that not only “small,” but also “business” could refer to the man’s penis. So “Small Business Saturday” made a strong laugh trigger to link the two topic handles.
To make the joke as funny as possible, I used my Joke Maximizer #3: Backload the topic. Specifically, I worded the topic so that the elements that the punch line depends on the most–“Black Friday” and “naked”–came as close to the end of the topic as possible.
I also used my Joke Maximizer #11: Don’t be too on-the-nose. An on-the-nose version of the joke would have ended something like, “Police said the man’s penis reminded them of Small Business Saturday”; not as funny.