I used to hate the groanworthy puns I heard.
My dad’s a big fan of them – puns were a staple of his humour suite growing up, I think. In Christian fundie circles they were pretty common, too. Really forced puns, too, where you’d give a joke a two-minute setup for a pun that honestly wasn’t all that clever. I mean, the whole point of a pun is a double meaning, but sometimes they’re not even.
See it’s one thing for a thing to sound like something else, but surely the best puns, the cleverest puns, are the ones where the two possible interpretations of the expression are meaningful to the context. One joke I’m familiar with and still weirdly fond of runs so, simplified for the reader’s time:
So first you start with a witch, who is then turned by chaos magic into a slaad (a type of D&D monster), and then uses the Desert Sands polymorph variant to transform herself into a chicken on the beach, making her a Chicken Slaad Sand Witch.
This isn’t really a good pun by my metric, it’s just kind of bald wordplay. Now I like wordplay. I like playing with the ways words interact and connect. But I really prefer when the pun has some connection to the meaning and couldn’t just be an elaborate typo for a much simpler concept. It’s not the bizarre forced-puns of Occupy Richie Rich.
Thing is, I make a lot of these puns. And not just ‘bad puns’ in that they’re not particularly funny, or ‘bad puns’ in the way that we commonly just call any pun ‘a bad pun.’ I mean bad puns in that they don’t pass my own metric for being interesting or funny. I just make a lot of them, and I think I’ve realised one of the reasons why:
It’s very hard for them to upset anyone.
It’s very hard for me to make a pun that actually hurts anyone. Oh there have been times when the puns have involved some of the magic words that are inherently hurtful (and I am not talking about slurs here).
Slowly take everything away and we’ll play with the dirt if we must.