The joke:
Today is National Wine Day. To mark the occasion, congressional Democrats sent over to President Trump a Subpoena Grigio.
How I wrote it:
The topic caught my eye because the handle “wine” has a lot of associations that can be used to create punch lines.
The other possible handle in the topic is something like “holiday.” But my instincts told me that it might be more fun to link the topic to pop culture, the technique that I call Punch Line Maker #2. Because President Trump seems to dominate the news, I tried to write a political joke.
The handle “wine” is associated with all the various types of wines. I ran through the types in my head and landed on “pinot grigio.” The Democrats have been issuing a lot of subpoenas to the Trump administration, so I decided to construct a wordplay punch line connecting “subpoena” and “pinot grigio.”
How to make the joke clear in print form was little tricky. “Subpinot grigio” and “subpoenot grigio” seemed potentially confusing to readers. But I thought “subpoena grigio” would work well because “grigio” makes the connection to wine obvious all by itself without having to explicitly include any part of “pinot.”
I try to write political jokes that are unlikely to split a mass audience, like this joke. Whatever you think of the Democrats and their subpoenas, everybody can agree that they’ve been issuing a lot of them, of all different types.