Tag Archives: USC

Joke About Osama bin Laden’s Son

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The joke:

According to U.S. officials, Osama bin Laden’s son is believed to be dead. Bad timing for him: He had just gotten into USC as an elite rower.

How I wrote it:

Jokes about death can be tricky because the subject can bring out negative emotions in an audience that make it hard for them to laugh. But I figured a joke about the death of the future leader of Al Qaeda wouldn’t summon too many negative emotions.

To create this joke I gravitated toward Punch Line Maker #2: Link the topic to pop culture. I focused on the topic handle “Osama bin Laden’s son” and its association in my mind with “privileged child of somebody infamous.”

Then I thought about other privileged children of infamous people and settled on actress Lori Loughlin’s daughter, who had been admitted to USC after she fraudulently claimed she was an elite rower.

That example of USC’s crooked admissions process seemed like a fun connection to make so it became the basis of my punch line. But I made USC the focus of the punch line instead of Lori Loughlin’s daughter because I felt the audience would feel more comfortable laughing at the former.

The angle for the joke came last. Natural angles to consider for a topic like this are “The good news is…” and “The bad news is…” but neither of those fit logically into the joke. So I avoided any logic problem by adding the angle “Bad timing for him.”

Joke About Pi Day

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The joke:
It’s March 14, Pi Day. To celebrate, a USC athletic coach took a bribe of 3.14 million dollars.

How I wrote it:
The topic of Pi Day caught my eye because it promised to be a fertile topic for joke writing. That’s because pi, the number 3.14…, has a lot of associations that can be used to generate punch lines.

But the topic of Pi Day has only one obvious handle–pi–so I turned to Punch Line Maker #2 for a second handle. That’s the technique where you link the topic to pop culture.

One of the big news stories was the college admissions bribery scandal, and USC was at the center of that, so I decided to write a punch line about a USC coach taking a bribe.

My next task was to somehow link the handle “USC bribe” to “pi.”  Both of those handles are associated with numbers, so my laugh trigger became “a bribe of 3.14 million dollars.”

I finished the joke by adding the angle “to celebrate,” which tends to be a useful angle for jokes about holidays.

$3.14 million was a good size for the bribe in my joke. It’s much bigger than the alleged USC bribes apparently were, and Joke Maximizer #8 advises, “Wildly exaggerate.” But it’s not so big that it’s distractingly huge, the way $3.14 billion would have been.