We’re going to break down the #1 ranked blonde joke (the #4 ranked street joke) of all time. A street joke is simply a joke that is commonly heard from non-comedians.

This is a great way of punching up your material. Be careful to never use this while writing new material. It’s only beneficial when punching up existing material.

In this breakdown, I’m only going to focus on tightening the material.

I’m going to go through this process slowly for this article… but it shouldn’t take you very long to do this.

STEP 1: COPY DOWN

When I’m punching up material, I always begin by hearing the joke performed on stage. So step 1 is getting the joke copied onto paper:

‘A young blonde woman is distraught because she fears her husband is having an affair, so she goes to a gun shop and buys a handgun. The next day she comes home to find her husband in bed with a beautiful redhead. She grabs the gun and holds it to her own head. The husband jumps out of bed, begging and pleading with her not to shoot herself. Hysterically the blonde responds to the husband, “Shut up…you’re next!” ‘.

STEP 2: BREAK INTO CHUNKS

In this step, we’re looking for sensible places to insert a pause. The first sentence of this joke is 26 words. This is far too much time without a pause. Try to say the first line without taking a breath or pause. It won’t feel natural. You’ll feel like you’re running out of air part way through. We want to capture our natural speaking rhythm in our writing.

Take a look at this joke… where would you insert the pauses?

The first line and the last line both have commas where a natural pause can go. The middle lines are short enough that we probably don’t need a pause before the period.

Assuming an average speaking speed, here how I’d parse out this joke.

HERE’S THE BREAKDOWN

‘A young blonde woman is distraught because she fears her husband is having an affair,

so she goes to a gun shop and buys a handgun.

The next day she comes home to find her husband in bed with a beautiful redhead.

She grabs the gun and holds it to her own head.

The husband jumps out of bed, begging and pleading with her not to shoot herself.

Hysterically the blonde responds to the husband,

“Shut up…you’re next!” ‘.

For clarity, I’ll put an “S” in front of a setup line and a “P” in front of the punch.

S- ‘A young blonde woman is distraught because she fears her husband is having an affair,

S- so she goes to a gun shop and buys a handgun.

S- The next day she comes home to find her husband in bed with a beautiful redhead.

S- She grabs the gun and holds it to her own head.

S- The husband jumps out of bed, begging and pleading with her not to shoot herself.

S- Hysterically the blonde responds to the husband,

P- “Shut up…you’re next!”

IDENTIFY IMPORTANT INFORMATION

All we’ve done so far is get the joke into a form where we can see everything written out.

The first step of the actual punch-up is going to be identifying important information. The setup line contains all the information necessary to understand the joke. If we edit any of the key information out then our joke will either suffer or die completely.

We identify this information for 3 reasons:

To make sure we don’t accidentally edit it out while punching up the joke.
It tells us how spread out the key information is.
It helps us find places where we can reinforce key information.

Here’s how I broke down the key information. Yours doesn’t necessarily have to be the same… but it should be very similar to what I have below.

S- ‘A young blonde woman is distraught because she fears her husband is having an affair,

S- so she goes to a gun shop and buys a handgun.

S- The next day she comes home to find her husband in bed with a beautiful redhead.

S- She grabs the gun and holds it to her own head.

S- The husband jumps out of bed, begging and pleading with her not to shoot herself.

S- Hysterically the blonde responds to the husband,

P- “Shut up…you’re next!”

WHY I CHOSE EACH KEYWORD/KEY-PHRASE

blonde woman

I didn’t choose this as a keyword just because it was a “blonde joke.” Identifying the girl as a blonde is a key piece of information for the audience. Once “blonde woman” is said, we have a different set of expectations than if it was simply “a woman.”

If you edited this out of the joke, the punchline “Shut up…you’re next!” would likely fall flat. As the audience identifies “Shut up…you’re next!” as a punchline, they’ll instantly try to connect that information to the setup… but if you edit out “blonde” than the only other place to connect the punchline to is “a woman” (or whatever is substituted in for blonde). The joke is no longer a lighthearted blonde joke. Now the audience has to figure out if you’re saying “all women are this stupid” or something else. Best case scenario, they don’t laugh… worst case, they’re offended… all because you didn’t tell them what to connect the punchline to.

find her husband in bed with _____

This gives reason to her actions. I edited out everything after with because it’s not actually important to the joke. You can put in any noun in the blank and the joke’s structure wouldn’t change (the laughter would… but the structure wouldn’t).

grabs the gun

Introduces the gun.

holds it to her own head.

The word “Own” here is very important here because it reinforces where the gun is pointing. Technically, the phrase “holds a gun to her head” and “holds a gun to her own head” are the same once you say the next line: “The husband begs and pleads with her not to shoot herself.”

So why not edit out “own” if it’s saying the same thing as “herself” in the next line? The word “own” gives the audience much more time to digest the important information than if you only had “pleading with her not to shoot herself.” The word gives the audience a full second or so to understand that piece of information before hitting the punchline.

It also cuts down on confusion. If you only say “holds it to her head” then the audiences likely response is going to be “who is her?” As a comedian, I’m saying the next line… but the audience isn’t paying attention because half of them are still trying to make sure they understand the setup. Now the comedian hits the punchline and half of the audience isn’t sure if she’s shooting herself and then her husband or shooting the mistress and then her husband… two very different endings.

pleading with her not to shoot herself.

“Not to shoot herself” is the most important information here for the joke. This is the final piece of the puzzle before the punchline. After the comedian says “herself” the audience should completely understand what’s happening. They should have a very clear mental picture of what you’re saying.

“Pleading with her” isn’t entirely necessary for the joke, but I added it as a keyword because it supports the emotions of the situation. The structure of the joke doesn’t change whether you say “pleading with” or “talking to” or “asking her.” The only thing that changes is the emotions behind the scene. Since the joke makes the most sense with the blonde being “distraught,” the phrase “pleading with” is likely the best choice.

“Shut up…you’re next!”

If the comedian has done his job right then the audience should instantly see the comedic conflict. They should easily be able to connect a very short punchline with all the necessary information above. All of this connecting happens in about 1/10 of a second after the punchline.

Tightening The Joke

Now that we understand how the joke is working right now, we can look for ways to fix it.

The first thing I generally do when I’m coaching new comedians is cut out the fat in their setup. If you’re a new comedian, you’d be surprised at how much fat can be cut out of a joke.

The original joke started with 79 words. Lets see if we can cut that down.

ORIGINAL

S- ‘A young blonde woman is ~~distraught because she fears~~ her husband is having an affair,

S- ‘A blonde woman thinks her husband is having an affair,

Do I care if she’s young? Mostly likely not. I’d edit this word out and see if the joke gets the same laughter before deciding on it.

“Distraught” can be edited out. We clearly understand her emotions when she puts a gun to her own head. No need to introduce that emotion now.

“Distraught because she fears…” is a long-winded way of setting up a cheating husband joke.

S- so she goes to a gun shop and buys a handgun.

S- so she buys a handgun.

Why do I care where she bought it? Needless information. All I need to know is that she’ll have a gun at the time she catches the husband cheating.

S- The next day she comes home to find her husband in bed with a beautiful redhead.

S- Later, she finds her husband in bed with a beautiful redhead.

“The next day” is OK… but not great. Any word that sets up her having a gun and catching the husband cheating works. I chose to say “later” because it’s shorter and does the same thing.

“She comes home” probably doesn’t need to be here. Simply saying the wife “caught his husband cheating” is enough for us to already have a mental picture of what’s happening.

I’ll keep “beautiful redhead” in the setup because it adds to the story. The joke structure wouldn’t change if you said “a woman” or “a beautiful redhead,” but I like how it adds to the story. Simply saying “a woman” is kinda boring.

S- She grabs the gun and holds it to her own head.

S- She grabs the gun and holds it to her own head.

I wouldn’t change this one.

S- The husband jumps out of bed, begging and pleading with her not to shoot herself.

S- The husband pleads with her not to shoot herself.

Jumping out of bed isn’t important. It doesn’t help the punchline and it doesn’t make the story more interesting to listen to.

Just saying he “pleads with her…” is enough. The purpose of this setup line is for the audience to understand that she wants to kill herself with the gun. How hard the husband was trying to convince her not to kill herself isn’t really important here.

S- Hysterically the blonde responds to the husband,

P- “Shut up…you’re next!”

So we’ve cut out a lot of the fat in the joke without losing any of the important information. The joke has gone from 79 words to 66 words. By dropping 13 words, we’ve cut the setup time for the joke down by over 15%.

That means…

You can get to more jokes because you’ve saved time in this one
The audience now has less information to sort through in order to understand the joke

Both of these are excellent outcomes. Less setup lines means getting to more punchlines. At the same time, we’ve increased the quality of our joke by helping the audience connect all the important information in the setup to the punchline.