The joke:
Disney is closing its immersive Star Wars-themed hotel in Orlando. Apparently they may have gone a little too far with the Star Wars theme: hotel guests kept finding their bathtub drains clogged with Wookiee hair.
How I wrote it:
I thought I could get a good joke out of this topic because it has two handles–“Star Wars” and “hotel”–that have lots of associations that could be linked to create a punch line.
The topic raised the question in my mind “Why are they closing their Star Wars-themed hotel?” That is, I started the joke-writing process with my Punch Line Maker #3: Ask a question about the topic.
To answer that question in a surprising way, and thus get a punch line, I decided to come up with a specific problem that the Star Wars theme could have caused at the hotel.
To do that, I first brainstormed problems that a hotel stay could be associated with. As I did, I remembered the time I checked into a low-budget motel and found a hair in the bathtub that the cleaner had missed. Exaggerating that one hair into a drain full of hair, I arrived at a problem that would really repel hotel guests.
Next I brainstormed associations of “Star Wars” in search of a hairy character. Chewbacca quickly came to mind, but “Wookiee” (I checked the spelling) sounded a little funnier. And that’s how I arrived at the basic idea for my punch line, a drain full of Wookiee hair.
As I chose the words for the punch line, I had in mind my Joke Maximizer #7: Use stop consonants, alliteration, and assonance. Starting with the T in “hotel,” the finished punch line has 13 stop consonants (B, D, G, K, P, and T), which help make the joke as funny as it can be.
I also used my Joke Maximizer #4: Make everything clear. I did that by repeating “Star Wars” in the angle, to make sure the audience would immediately remember what “Wookiee” means.