There are some places you expect puns, and some where it feels like they sneak up on you. Like this in the Washington Post:
Dow’s ruling whey-ed in on this question, parsing the legal aspects of different types of cheese. He cited a previous decision in which a court found that parmesan was shelf stable. And he found merit in Joseph’s argument that plenty of crunchy, shelf-stable snacks contain other kinds of cheeses. “Defendant has not indicated why mozzarella is inherently not shelf-stable,” he wrote. https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2022/12/06/tgi-fridays-mozzarella-sticks-lawsuit/
Many newspaper editors love(d) a good pun and would/will slip them into headlines when they can get away with it. Often, the reading public would be none the wiser about it but those who know to search for puns could find them almost every day. Today, pun occurrences do seem to be less frequent in headlines, or it could just be my reading habits have changed.
A favorite from 4-5 years back: Anytime snaps up California fitness chain. Anytime Fitness being the local company and Snap 1-2-3 being the California-based chain. If you weren’t paying attention, you would not see the pun.
Did you hear about the dwarf psychic who was accused of murder and then broke out of jail? The next day the local paper’s headlines read, “SMALL MEDIUM AT LARGE.”
