Topical jokes– Take a piece of news and effectively turn it into a joke by:

• One sentence setup that sets up a premise by stating the fact in a semi-concise way
• Playing with language and spelling
  •  e.g. ‘Påpa Dzon’
• Using high/low language, working with the setup through connections
  • e.g. Royal family → Big Mama
  • e.g. Nine year olds → “Promise” v. “Dino Chicken Nuggets”
• Creating incongruities
  • e.g. between statistics and race
• Using puns but not making them “groaners”, making them fluid and work within the context of the joke themselves
  • e.g. Correlation does not imply caucasian
• Inserting colloquial language in with actual news, deflecting the joke away from a serious nature
  • e.g. “well, at least she wasn’t a witch”
• Recognizable connection
  • e.g. Salem and witches
• Inserting the comedian’s voice, creating a personal commentary on a pure fact; creates a comedic shift
  • e.g. “Nobody finds this bitch cute”
• Applying humor to serious premises, undermining the seriousness of an actual political event → going more serious from an already relatively serious premise
  • e.g. “Single use [Chinese] party members
• High stakes and tension; creates a release with the joke → going from more serious to less serious
  • e.g. “Not the type of threesome we were talking about!”

Language Challenge 1– Make a good comic simile by:

• Heightening or an incongruity in the stakes
  • e.g. “like a DIY Vasectomy Kit”
• Something being very relatable or wildly not relatable 
  • e.g. unrelatable = uncle with his pants on
• Novel imagery, anything that calls into question the history of the writer
  • e.g. “DIY Vasectomy Kit”
• Something you shouldn’t laugh at, mocking of a viewpoint
  • e.g. Woman in a voting booth
• Using specificity → imagery can make the joke especially funny 

The Life and Times of The Thunderbolt Kid – Create humorous descriptions with nouns by:

• Making the noun unpredictable, ambiguous
  • e.g. “Abandoned chewings”, “syphilitic dribblings”
• Picking a new noun each time the reference is made
• Tracking the narrator’s psychology
• Increasing nouns in specificity as the piece goes on
  • e.g. candy → Chuckles
• Using a shorter noun → conveying the same thing in fewer words is often more forceful (and therefore more humorous)

Language Challenge 3– Create humorous descriptions with modifiers by:

• Opposition of verb and adverb
  • e.g. “Feverishly” v. “Slow, procedural, and consensual”
• Creating a character and showing their reaction in the modifier
  • e.g. “begrudgingly”
• Setting up with an adverb, joke comes from the fact of the word (Language game) 
  • e.g. “kafkaesque” and “hermeneutical”
• Using adjectives and adverbs that contract the thing that they modify
  • e.g. “Absentmindedly” v. “made out”
• Avoiding modifiers that reinforce/add emphasis to the thing they modify
  • e.g. “he ran quickly” v. “he scurried