We all love puns

[datsunaholic]

Who wrote what on the baseball diamond?

[MajGenl.Meade]

Because

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[Lord Jim]

[Long Run]

[Econoline]

Send leather jackets to each of the ten people on this list. Then cross out that line and send the list to ten more friends, each of whom will have to send you ten leather jackets before passing the list on to ten additional friends. By the end of this month, if you don't break the chain, you will receive more than a thousand leather jackets!

-- A Fonzie Scheme.

[Long Run]

If You Think You Hate Puns, You're Wrong

Pun competitions prove that it's possible to elevate these groan-worthy jokes into an art form.
By Joe Berkowitz
Apr 30, 2018

The English language is almost nightmarishly expansive, and yet there is no good way to respond when someone drops a bad pun in casual conversation.

“Stop” seems ideal, but it’s too late—they already did it. If your esophagus cooperates, you can mimic a human chuckle, or you can just steamroll through, ignoring the elephant now parked in your conversational foyer. Either way, having to deal at all with the demand that wordplay be acknowledged is probably the reason so many people think they hate puns.

Those people are wrong.

In fairness, puns all too frequently are the lowest-hanging comedy fruit. At one point or another, we've all plucked one indiscriminately and ruined someone’s day. Your friend mentions not being a fan of cats, and a connection forms in your brain. Before you can stop yourself, the words have left your lips: You must be kitten. Now you've earned a spot on your friend's shit list, right next to felines, and frankly you deserve it.

Puns are more like eggplant than low-hanging fruit, though. The prospect of eating eggplant in its natural state—shiny, dimpled skin and the spongy seedgarden underneath—is extremely barfy. But there are so many ways to prepare those purple euphemisms, and the distance between undercooked eggplant parmigiana and Michelin star baingan bharta is astronomical. The same goes for puns. (For instance, the pun bangin’ bharta is not good, despite the fact that I’m physically incapable of not making it in any Indian food situation.)

Some puns are just interruptive white noise while others have the power to make people stand up and scream. It’s a phenomenon I thoroughly experienced firsthand while researching the book, Away With Words: An Irreverent Tour Through the World of Pun Competitions. (It has always been my heart’s secret dream to write a book that would make people ask, “How is that a book?”)

I’ve personally witnessed crowds go nuts over puns, as they will at next month's 41st Annual O. Henry Museum Pun-Off World Championships in Austin, Texas. But I’ve also keenly familiar with how much puns are also reviled. A lot of folks do not care for them! Puns are less loved than the music of Smash Mouth or a bowlful of yellow Starbursts. People cringe at the word alone—it catches in the ear, dredging up sense memories of wacky English teachers, and the negative space where laughs should be. They’re the kind of joke most likely to be preceded or followed by an apology. (“Pardon the pun.” Or don’t! Maybe send it to the firing squad!) However, nobody who appreciates humor or language or even just the mystic complexity of how our weird brains works could fully dismiss them. It just depends on what the situation is, who's making the pun, whether it sucks, and even how it sucks.

Puns are embedded in everything people don’t like—advertising, novelty menu items, morning news show banter, movie review headlines—and often delivered with a certain smirking expectancy. The point too often seems to be less about the clean feng shui of inventive wordplay, than the fact that someone has made a pun at all.

The good news is that puns are also embedded in everything people do like, and in the right hands they are tiny word-shaped miracles. Think Kanye West on the song “Otis” (“I’ll hit you up mañan-nahhh!”) Think of all the greatest gutter-filthy insults on Veep, like when someone refers to the gangly Jonah as “Jizzy Gillespie.” Think Seth Meyers monologues, Daily Show chyrons like “Mess O’Potamia,” or when Donnell Rawlins said on Guy Code, "The only loofa a man should have in his house is Loofa Vandross." Puns are, to use a dicey second vegetable metaphor, the onions of comedy. They can go in just about everything.

More at: https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/b ... e-of-puns/

[Big RR]

To each his own, I guess; you won't see me at the World Championships. Indeed, if that last paragraph presents examples of the best puns (miracles?) created, I wonder how they could have a championship at all. And if, as he suggests, it's situational and "you have to be there" (better get a tub-man?), well I guess I just will be content being the loser and not won't getting it; but then I think I won't be missing much.

[Crackpot]

The best way to determine the success of a pun is by the look or sound made by listener. In my opinion the best puns are those that are so subtle the listener doesn’t get is right away. The perfect lag time being about a sentance by you or a quick reply from the victim before the “pun convulsions” take place. As written punning is a difficult task because unless you are in open punny dialogue a victim may not or even will not be acknowledged.

[Long Run]

To each his own, I guess; you won't see me at the World Championships. * * * I think I won't be missing much.

You are in good company:

. . . no circumstances, however dismal, will ever be considered a sufficient excuse for the admission of that last and saddest evidence of intellectual poverty, the Pun.

Mark Twain, A Biography.

[RayThom]

I had a late lunch with my daughter at the Peking Wok on Saturday.

I told her we were celebrating Chinko de Mayo. She gave me the hairy eyeball about three seconds later.

Life is good.

[Bicycle Bill]

This is a classic Hawaiian pizza — sauce, mozzarella cheese, ham, and pineapple.
But when you cook it you must take care not to burn the pineapple.



That's why it is important to set the oven to aloha temperature.

-"BB"-

[RayThom]

"Throwback Wednesday"

coat of many colors....
by Lord Jim » Fri May 15, 2015 6:22 pm

What do you call a guy who wears a robe and sandals and makes sandwiches?

The Deli Lama!



Thank you, thank you, I'll be here all week...