Former Head Writer of the Tonight Show Picks His Joke of the Week

Congrats to Michael Roy for winning this week’s joke pick!

Pro comedy writer Joe Toplyn, Former head-writer of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and Late Show with David Letterman, picks his joke of the week:

Winner: Michael Roy, Follow him on Comedywire

Joe’s comments:

Setup: A plane crashed in Mexico but everyone on board survived.

Punch line: Wow. Even Death won’t let them cross over.

Michael’s great joke is an example of Punch Line Maker #1: Link two associations of the topic.

One handle of the topic, “Mexico,” has the association “immigrants,” which has the sub-association “prevented from crossing the border.”

Another handle of the topic, “survived,” has the association “didn’t die,” which has the sub-association “didn’t ‘cross over’.”

Michael’s punch line links those two sub-associations by observing that Death prevented the Mexicans from crossing yet another border.

Michael used Joke Maximizer #2, making sure to put his laugh trigger, “cross over,” at the very end of the punch line.

He also made good use of Joke Maximizer #1: Shorten as much as possible. Not one word could be cut without hurting the joke.

What about cutting the word “Wow,” you might ask. “Wow” helps the joke because it adds an angle to the topic. It leads the audience to expect a remark about how amazing it is that everyone survived. Because the audience is expecting that, they are even more surprised to hear, instead, the punch line about crossing borders. And the bigger the surprise, the bigger the laugh.

Four-time Emmy winner Joe Toplyn is a former head writer for David Letterman and Jay Leno. He also wrote the book “Comedy Writing for Late-Night TV.”