The Joke Workshop : Module 1 : Expanding the one liner

The title of this Module has very little to do with shipping ( actually, nothing to do with shipping ), but does have a lot to do with turning one liners into more rounded gags.  Now you may be perfectly happy with the one liner as it is; perhaps your routine is just single line humour.  That's fine, but the purpose of this and all the forthcoming exercises we'll do is to explore ways of creating new jokes, and that means not just accepting a gag as you hear it or read it but looking to mould it to your style and seeing if you can improve on it.

So let's get our first example in the vice.  I've taken it from The Jester and it is one of my own ( modestly accepts praise for this ).

Can you get CJD playing Scrabble?

I was originally playing around with BSE ( the term, not the disease ) because I felt there was something new to be had with it.  I'd seen one or two 'Mad Cow' examples but I tried approaching it from the letters angle; BSE.  I then thought about CJD and suddenly Scrabble popped into my head, and my one liner was born.

We can, however, look to take this idea and construct a more rounded joke.  Looking at other bugs we humans are prone to I thought about MRSA.  Very topical,  rife in the NHS, and a name made up of letters!  Keeping the Scrabble idea we could just replace CJD with MRSA in the original ...

Can you get MRSA playing Scrabble?

( notice how we have to say 'get' rather than 'catch' to make this work )
But thinking about it, Scrabble can be found in hospital wards ( usually a tatty box with some tiles missing that probably came from a Charity Shop ) alongside MRSA.  If we take our hacksaw and chisel and go to work on our original, we end up with

Did you hear they've banned Scrabble from hospital wards. 
They're scared patients will get MRSA.

Now we have a more rounded joke that works better if your style is more conversational.  It's also topical, which is what all joke tellers want, from the professional to the guy in the office with his regular email list.

In summary then, when looking at one liners, don't just laugh, or smile, or grimace, and move on.  Think about it for a moment and just give yourself a minute's brainstorming.  Can I change this to make it better?  What makes it funny, or not?  It may not be written in a style that suits me, but can I give it the workbench treatment and create a gag that does work for me?

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.  That concludes our first Module.  Light refreshments are now being served.

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Move on to Module 2  -  Word Play