The joke:
Sports Illustrated is laying off most of its staff. Fortunately, one group of employees has agreed to work without pay–the Swimsuit Issue bikini inspectors.
How I wrote it:
I thought I could turn this news item into a joke pretty easily because both of its topic handles have many associations. “Sports Illustrated” has both sports and magazine associations. And “laying off” is associated with reasons for the layoffs, which employees were laid off, and so on.
Because of the many associations, I gravitated toward my Punch Line Maker #1: Link two associations of the topic.
One of the most prominent associations of “Sports Illustrated” is its annual Swimsuit Issue. As I visualized that issue, “bikini inspector” popped into my head. It’s a funny phrase, with five stop consonants. It’s also a job title, so I realized that I could use it as a laugh trigger that’s associated with “laid off.” And I had the idea for my punch line.
But to complete the joke I needed to connect the topic to the punch line with an effective angle. An ineffective angle might result in a joke like this: “Sports Illustrated is laying off most of its staff. That includes the Swimsuit Issue bikini inspectors.” That angle is ineffective because it doesn’t guide the audience logically to the punch line in a way that maximizes surprise, and therefore funniness.
To come up with an effective angle, I thought about those bikini inspectors. It occurred to me that they probably really, really love their job. So, thinking logically, I asked myself how they would react to the news of the layoffs.
My answer: they would agree to work without pay. That answer supplied the logic I needed to construct an angle that misleads the audience. With that angle, the audience thinks at first that the joke is talking about a group of selfless employees who love the magazine and its readers. But the punch line reveals—surprise!—that those employees actually love ogling mostly-naked women.