Same.
I didn’t even realize Discworld had puns. I read it as straight fantasy.
It doesn’t. It has punes.
Damn, I was just going to post that link and suggest the thread title should have used that word!
I’ll never get over the feeling that there’s a pun in “Ankh-Morpork” that I’m missing.
I came in here to post this.
I don’t think it’s a pun as such, but it’s inspired by Budapest, originally two cities Buda and Pest.
Well, this is a morepork - we have one nesting in the garden - and it does seem to be featured on the city’s crest, clutching an ankh, but what the connection is I couldn’t say.
Note that the “ankh” syllable also occurs in Lankhmar. Not a conscious thing on Pterry’s part, apparently, although Fafhrd and Grey Mouser do cameo in CoM.
I looked for one a long time too, but from what I remember Terry said there’s no pun in Ankh-Morpork. The river is the Ankh, with a twinned-city of Morpork on the opposite bank, like St Paul and Minneapolis, amongst many other examples.
How could it not have been deliberate? We meet the Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser expies even before we meet Rincewind.
The Colour of Magic stories were simple parodies of established fantasy stories and Pterry might have initially intended for the Barbarian and the Their to be the observer characters rather than the Wizzard and the Tourist.
(I consider CoM and TLF to be in canon but not actual Diskworld books.)
There are no American :jelly babies", but you can buy British Jelly Babies at stores specializing in British food imports. I got a couple of packages a few years ago when I was the Tom Baker /Doctor for Halloween. (I transferred them to small paper bags, of course).
A truly excellent resource is the Annotated Pratchett File. It’s a crowdsourced repository of Discworld jokes, though it hasn’t been updated in years beyond making note of his later works.
For the entries that do have lots of annotations, it’s worth one’s time to give the book a re-read and reference the site every chapter or two. It’s a great way to appreciate the breadth of Pratchett’s jokes.
In Thief of Time we have Jeremy Clockson and Lobsang Ludd. I got the first one upon first reading but the second one had to be pointed out to me.
Not being a huge star wars fan, I struggled with Ankh Morpork being a pun an the legendary hive of villiany, but that turned out to be Anchorhead, not Anchorport. Pity.
That’s not the onlyfictional person it’s referencing.
One of my favourite Judge Dredd jokes was a street gang named Lobsang Rampant.
Wasn’t there a character named Lobsang in Moving Pictures, too? A brother of C. M. O. T. Dibbler, if I remember correctly.
Same guy, he was just calling himself Grand Master Lobsang Dibbler to sell dodgy martial arts courses in Witches Abroad.
There’s also Rosy Palm, who runs a brothel where she employs what Carrot thought were her five “daughters”.