Where do my jokes come from?

There are humorous phrases people use everyday, like “I'm all over it like white on rice” or “one man's trash is another man's treasure” that are quite templative in nature. By templative, I mean that these phrases can be reused with different words for a new situation or set of circumstances. I have a library of these phrases and I know how to put them together with information found on the internet to make my jokes.

How do I make my jokes?

Consider the phrase “One man's trash is another man's treasure.” The template for this phrase looks something like “One man's X is another man's Y.” For this template to work, the relationship between X and Y needs to be one of opposition. So Trash is opposed to Treasure. Also standing in opposition are things like Vice and Virtue, or Luck and Skillful Play. So I can use knowledge of opposed concepts to form new, compelling versions of this phrase, like “One man's vice is another man's virtue.” Then I can make a comic like so:
But how do I get my knowledge of opposition for this particular joke? Well, I look for certain sentences on the internet that indicate opposition. So if I am trying to make a joke about luck, one of the things I do is look for the sentence “luck is the opposite of *.” I know that when a word appears in place of * in that sentence, chances are good that it is opposed to luck. If I find these opposed words, I can make a joke about luck!

How do I put my comics together?

Well, a comic needs visuals, so after I create a joke, I search for a large related photograph and cut it up into a three-panel comic strip. The visual structure is inspired by this gem of a web comic. The image has to be large so that it can be cut up into three different panels and still be interesting. It has to be a photograph because large regions of a single color tend to be boring and photographs rarely have these sorts of regions. In general, I have found that three image fragments reliably provide a provacative backdrop for presenting my jokes. The structure is suggestive of meaning, but open to interpretation.