Pun for the Ages

[PoliticalChic]

By JOSEPH TARTAKOVSKY
Published: March 28, 2009

THE inglorious pun! Dryden called it the “lowest and most groveling kind of wit.” To Ambrose Bierce it was a “form of wit to which wise men stoop and fools aspire.” Universal experience confirms the adage that puns don’t make us laugh, but groan. It is said that Caligula ordered an actor to be roasted alive for a bad pun. (Some believe he was inclined to extremes.)

Addison defined the pun as a “conceit arising from the use of two words that agree in the sound, but differ in the sense.” “Energizer Bunny Arrested! Charged with Battery.” No laugh? Q.E.D.

Puns are the feeblest species of humor because they are ephemeral: whatever comic force they possess never outlasts the split second it takes to resolve the semantic confusion. Most resemble mathematical formulas: clever, perhaps, but hardly occasion for knee-slapping. The worst smack of tawdriness, even indecency, which is why puns, like off-color jokes, are often followed by apologies. Odds are that a restaurant with a punning name — Snacks Fifth Avenue, General Custard’s Last Stand — hasn’t acquired its first Michelin star.

Read more at below link if you think this is punny...

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/28/opinion/28Tartakovsky.html?_r=1

 

[Toro]

I always thought Pauley Shore movies were the lowest form of comedy...

 

[Diuretic]

I like puns. I also like shaggy dog stories.

I admit, I'm humor-challenged.

 

[PoliticalChic]

I like puns. I also like shaggy dog stories.

I admit, I'm humor-challenged.

No, I don't think you are humor-challenged at all. People put down puns, but to me it can be an art when used in the right situations. How bad could they be if Shakespeare liked and used them in his works?

These were some I found punny:

A hole has been found in the nudist camp wall. The police are looking into it.

Police were called to a daycare where a three-year-old was resisting a rest.

A small boy swallowed some coins and was taken to a hospital. When his grandmother telephoned to ask how he was a nurse said 'No change yet'.

It's not that the man did not know how to juggle, he just didn't have the balls to do it.

To write with a broken pencil is pointless.

Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.

What did the grape say when it got stepped on? Nothing - but it let out a little whine.

The butcher backed up into the meat grinder and got a little behind in his work.

There was once a cross-eyed teacher who couldn't control his pupils.

A prisoner's favorite punctuation mark is the period. It marks the end of his sentence.

Atheism is a non-prophet organization.

When a clock is hungry it goes back four seconds.

 

[Diuretic]

 

[garyd]

I used to speak punnese. Annoyed hell out of my wife when we first got married nearing 36 years ago...

Some of my favorites:

What did the nun say to the man who offered her a cigarette?

No thanks one habit is plenty.

An Old native chieftain was taken to England to meet the queen. While there he became most impressed by the throne upon which she sat and decide he must have one of those. So he buys this 500 hundred pound monstrostity and takes it with him when he returns home and set it up in his rambling grass long house and almost immediately discovers two things. the first is that while it certainly raises him up to an impressive height allowing him to tower over those entering into the royal throne room even when seated it is so tall that he almost has to crawl down off of it to keep from banging his head on the ceiling and second that the damn thing is the most amazingly uncomfortable damn thing he's ever had the displeasure place the royal backside upon and after a couple of weeks he has his followers stow the thing up in the attic.

Now as anyone with a little sense and a basic knowledge of engineering can tell you a grass hut isn't holding up five hundred pound sof much of anything for any lenghth of time and when the hut ceased to hold up the throne the chief was standing under it at the time and was crushed flat as a pancake.

Moral of story? People who live in grass houses shouldn't stow thrones.

 

[dilloduck]

Annual O. Henry punoff----May 15th--Austin TX--don't miss it.

 

[garyd]

I so miss the old Rocky and Bullwinkle show. More really bad puns in half an hour than you could count.