Tag Archives: Russia

Joke About Vladimir Putin

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The joke:

Today Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a law allowing him to run for president two more times. The law also extended absentee voting: whoever votes against Putin goes mysteriously absent.

How I wrote it:

I focused on this news item because I felt like, for a change, writing a joke about a politician who isn’t American. Plus this story made the national news in the U.S., so I thought my audience might have some interest in it.

First I distilled the news item into a topic sentence that contained only the elements I thought I’d need to write a joke. Some versions of the item had a headline like “Putin signs law that could keep him in Kremlin until 2036.” Other versions had a headline like “Putin signs law allowing him to run for two more terms as Russian President.” I adapted the latter headline into my topic sentence because it referred more directly to elections, and I sensed that I’d be writing a punch line about the election process.

Once I had a topic sentence, I used my Punch Line Maker #1: Link two associations of the topic. One topic handle, “run for president,” has the association “voting,” which has the sub-association “absentee voter.”

The other topic handle, “Vladimir Putin,” is associated in most people’s minds with “does terrible things to political opponents.” So I realized I could link the two topic handles with a punch line featuring some wordplay on “absentee voter.”

But working out the exact wording was a little tricky. I wanted to use my Joke Maximizer #6: Make the punch line parallel. But making the angle and punch line both refer to “absentee voter” would result in a punch line something like “whoever votes against Putin mysteriously becomes an absentee voter,” which doesn’t clearly communicate the idea that Putin is making them disappear. The wording that I settled on trades parallelism for clarity.

Joke About Russia and N. Korea

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The joke:

For the first time ever, Vladimir Putin will be meeting Kim Jong Un. It’s pretty cool. They’re meeting at a fancy hotel so the reservation will read “Putin Un, the Ritz.”

How I wrote it:

I gravitated toward this news item because the handles “Vladimir Putin” and “Kim Jong Un” both have a good number of associations that might be used to devise a punch line. Plus both of the names seem to lend themselves to wordplay.

I remembered this hilarious wordplay joke that Conan O’Brien once delivered in a monologue: “It’s been reported that in high school, Kim Jong Un starred in a production of the musical ‘Grease.’ That’s also where Kim met his first wife, Olivia Newton Jong.” So I first considered writing my own Kim Jong Un wordplay joke.

But then I noticed that “Putin” sounds like “puttin’,” which I associated with the song title “Puttin’ on the Ritz.” Then I got lucky, realizing that “on” sounds like “Un.”

Linking those two wordplays into a surprising new song title gave me my punch line, thanks to Punch Line Maker #4: Find a play on words in the topic.

My last task was to construct an angle that logically connects the topic to “Putin Un the Ritz.” The Ritz is a fancy hotel, and these summits often seem to take place at fancy hotels, so claiming that the punch line is a reservation for the summit seemed to do the job.