The joke:
Pizza Hut just added this to its menu: pizza with vegan pepperoni that’s made from rice and peas. It’s for pizza lovers whose favorite toppings are rice and peas.
How I wrote it:
This news item caught my eye because it seemed a little odd: Pepperoni is such a small part of a pepperoni pizza–just a topping. So how many new customers are likely to be attracted to Pizza Hut by little slices of vegan pepperoni?
Plus many versions of the news item referred to “plant-based pepperoni from Beyond Meat.” That wording promised numerous associations that might lead to a punch line.
But I was having a hard time coming up with one I was happy with. For example, it seemed unfair to link “Beyond Meat” to a judgmental association of “plant-based pepperoni” to get a laugh trigger like “Beyond Bland.”
So I read deeper into one news article to find out exactly what plants that pepperoni is made of. The answer, “rice and peas,” struck me as amusingly unlikely toppings for a pizza.
So I incorporated the “rice and peas” association in my Punch Line Maker #3. Specifically, I created a punch line that answers the question about the topic that I originally asked myself: Who would buy that pizza?
Then I went back and added “rice and peas” to my topic sentence, so I could use that phrase in my punch line.
Finally I wrote an angle referring to “pizza lovers” to heighten the surprise of the punch line, which describes a combination of toppings that few people are likely to love.