What Is a Pun?

This page provides an explanation and some examples of what puns are about. 


Puns are for people who enjoy wordplay, mind exercises, crosswords and Scrabble. These amateur punslingers have a sense of humor coupled with an inability to concentrate on the boring mundanities of life. 


Conversation dragging a bit? Make up a pun.


The worse or more clever the pun, and the bigger the groan - the better. That is the reason some of the puns on this site are really bad.


​Honest.

Introducing Puns

The pun is the highest form of wit and do not let anyone try to tell you otherwise.  The point being to quickly play with words and get a laugh or groan as your audience appreciates how clever you are or how awful the pun was.  Ideally both.

Here are a couple of examples.
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  • Apple's new pun - the iPun X
  • Shakespeare rhyming puns come in a punnet

Here is a real world example of creating and using a pun.  In a conversation about cat food the words "Cordon Bleu" came up.  Using a special punning voice I said slowly "Or you could say Cordon Purr".  You don't need a special punning voice but it adds to the moment and the irritation of the recipient.

So the idea is to change a word slightly to make a pun joke.  It is a fun or you could say PUN thing to do.

​Warning.  Too much punning can eventually lead to a messy divorce and there is nothing punny about that.

There's more.  There always is because the pun never stops.

Puns About Puns

Smelly pun - pungent
Always on time - punctual
Physical response to punners - punch
The pun is mightier than the sword

Store the good ones in a compundium
Relaxed gear for wearing while punning - punjamas
Using a pun to unlock a door - O Pun Sesame
​Where they put bad puns - punitentiary

​Respected commentator on puns - pundit
A joke writer will use a pun and puncil
​Popular language for punning - Punjabi
​The band who are always punning - Puns and Roses

Punning is but sometimes punderated
The Pope is great at it - they call him the Puntiff
All this punning is Pundemonium.
​Popular eighties pun music - punk

Humorous boat - punt
​Competitive punner - punslinger
​This second to last pun is the punultimate one
Pun back soon!

Punning on a Single Theme

The idea behind punning is to build on a theme. Find words related to the subject and change to make a simple joke.  This is a fun word game to play with friends to occupy empty moments, on your own when stuck for something to do or just plain bored.

Here are a few locust puns as examples of taking a word and playing with it. 

What do you call a slow locust?  A slow-cust.
What sort of train do they use?  A locust-motive.
What do you call locusts you can see in the dark?  Glow-custs.

People Who Hate Puns

There are many people who dislike puns.  They find them annoying and upsetting to their carefully ordered world. 

A fine example is Samuel Johnson who compiled his dictionary published in 1755.  A man capable of spending so long on an essentially mind-numbing project did not take kindly to people having the nerve to play with words.  He gave us this memorable quote.

"He who would violate the sanctities of his Mother Tongue would invade the recesses of the paternal till without remorse"

Worth memorising if you are losing a battle of puns with a friend.

Why AI Generated Puns Are So Bad

When I create puns for this website it involves remembering and sometimes learning key words connected with the subject and thinking of humorous ways to pun with them. It may require further reading to get into the zone of the subject area, to understand further what people do and why they do it. 


My puns are always better if I have a working knowledge of the area to make jokes about it.  The more you know about the subject - the better the puns.


Occasionally I will check out other pun pages. Some are good, where the writer comes across as genuinely interested and humorous.


Others are so bad it seems impossible that a human or native English speaker created them. Particularly those pages that offer hundreds of the best puns on the internet.


It is puzzling to skip through line after line of unfunny and meaningless puns. Where a word from a phrase or even just a normal sentence has been replaced with the key word. Tip: replacing the word like a mindless spinner is meaningless unless the result is actually funny.


These pun sites are somehow able to create masses of pages for different puns with hundreds of puns per page. They are often ranked highly, higher than more genuine offerings.


Sadly, the Google algorithm seems too dumb to measure humorous quality. Because humor is something AI and computers can't do. They can scrape and copy facts and arrange into coherent scripts.


AI is a huge advance on the old-fashioned spinning method of creating content.


But it can't do funny. That's a very human thing. Long may it remain the case.

Pun's End

That is the end of this discussion about puns. I hope it was fun, useful and vaguely informative.


​There are plenty of genuine human-created pun pages on this site.