Some books, songs, and movies have very clever titles which contain jokes or clues themselves. I know that I’ll think of a great many of these after I post this, but some examples are:
No Man Knows My History – a biography od LDS Church Founder Joseph Smith. The title comes from a quotation of Joseph Smith. Regardless of what you think of the LDS Church, or Joseph Smith, or this book, I maintain that the title itself is especuially clever as the title of this biography. Fawn Brodie, the author, was a woman. The Last of Sheila – underappreciated mystery movie. The title itself is a clue.
Logician Raymond Smullyan’s popular books of logic puzzles What is the Name of this Book? and This Book Needs no Title.
Desi Arnaz titled his autobiography A Book, since that’s what it was, after all.
In a similar vein, a satire of history textbooks written by the staff of The Daily Show was titled America: the Book, presumably so it wouldn’t be confused with America the country.
Isn’t their a song called “Download This Song” - catchy but talking about mp3s and music labels and after awhile it’s like “whoever you are you can’t write good lyrics about this subject and now it’s a whinge” but the title is like Hoffman’s “Steal This Book”
Rushdie’s “Satanic Verses” - Satanic as in they are the center of religious, social and gender debate in Islam but also a pun on the fact that they become seen as evil because of the way they are translated and transcribed in the book as well as the fact that he knew the book would be objected to for talking about such things.
Bernard Shaw’s “Pygmalion” - the idea of creating one’s ideal mate from the Greek Myth of Pygmalion and Galatea. If you don’t know what I am referring to - it got turned into My Fair Lady the musical.
One collection of Theodore Sturgeon was titled Caviar, presumably because it was the best of Sturgeon.
John Sladek’s novel of self-replicating robots was titled The Reproductive System.
Arrested Development is a punning title: George Bluth is a developer and he is arrested, arresting the development of the property. And, of course, everyone in the family is a case of arrested development.
Similarly, the short-lived Cops parody, Arresting Behavior had a double meaning in the arresting behavior of the cops, and their behavior while arresting people.
Isacc Asimov’s “Shah Guido G” gives a clue to what type of story it turns out to be.
There was a British rock band called Sad Cafe. They released an album alled Facades, this being an anagram of ‘Sad Cafe’. (The band’s name was itself taken from the title of a novel, The Ballad Of The Sad Cafe.)
When Rick Wakeman formed his first band, he called it Sour Milk. Because as the time, Cream were the biggest band in rock.
One of the first mainstream books about the crop circle phenomenon, and the seeming difficulty of establishing a definitive explanation, was called Round In Circles.
A magician called Simon Aronson published some small booklets for the magic trade, each of which was well-regarded. After some time, people asked him to put these small booklets together in one single volume, thus making them easier to get and to refer to. Aronson eventually did so. He called the collection, Bound To Please.
Ruth Rendell wrote a very good mystery called Simisola. I read it only because I had heard that you don’t learn the meaning of the title until the last word of the book.
One of my favorites by Agatha Christie is Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?, which turns out to be a really great title for this mystery, making it all the more incomprehensible that they changed the title for the American release to something that reveals the secret of the original title (which is why I won’t post it here).
My favorite title is Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
First there is the initial mental visual of artificial beings dreaming of artificial sheep. (Robots counting robot sheep.) But as you read the book it goes becomes a deeper meaning about when an artificail intelligence becomes intelligent enough, is it human. With human desires. Edited because I am not as intellegent as my spellchecker