This thread reminded me of a short Asimov story that finished with a pun. I grew up reading Asimov books, but there’s one short story that has bugged me for years.
It finished (something like) “Yuletide apes eat only *fruit and nuts”
And that, folks, is all I remember beyond the frustration of still not getting the joke. For someone who regularly trots out the whole of Death of a Foy from the same book, it just ain’t right.
Your help, please? Story synopsis as well as the meaning would probably be helpful at this stage.
Euell (pronounced “yule”) Gibbons was a famous “natural food” (like fruits and nuts) promoter in the early 1970s. And he was on a TV commercial saying things like “Ever eat a pine tree?”
Oh, I forgot to add, the story is just a shaggy dog story to support the final pun: Yule gibbons (which you remember as yuletide apes, and which sounds like Euell Gibbons) only eats fruits and nuts. Cause he (Euell that is) did eat a lot of fruits and nuts, if not quite exclusively, and was quite famous in pop culture for while.
And man does explanation suck every last bit of funny out of something that was barely funny to begin with.
Death of a Foy is my all time favourite. Sloane’s Teddy wasn’t bad, it’s just that I ‘got’ it very early on - I haven’t read these stories since 1986, I’m amazed I remember any of the details at all. Shows some good quality writing, that does.
Asimov’s funny stories paved the way for my love of Harry Harrison and the Stainless Steel Rat series, which paved the way for all things Pratchett.
