As I observed in the “Amanda Seyfried and the Prosthetic Butthole” thread, certain articles (and other things) sometimes come up with superb puns, and I suggested that there ought to be a special award for them. In lieu of this, I submit the following thread for Great Punning Titles.
Here are the criteria:
1.) The title must be a pun, ideally related to the title of some famous or classic work. If a lot of Dopers aren’t familiar with that work and object to it, tough. A lot of things that used to be famous or required knowledge have fallen out of fashion these days.
2.) The pun and title ought not to be “forced” – it’s much better if things work out so that the pun fits very well naturally.
3.) Titles can be of magazine articles, internet articles, or the titles of works of art – books, plays, operas, poems, even television shows or videogames or the like.
An example of the type of pun (although it’s not actually the title of anything, and is pretty artificial since he had to set up the scene) was Dick Cavett’s suggestion that a photograph of Buster Keaton looking at Aristotle Onassis’ mansion be entitled “Buster Contemplating the Home of Aristotle.”. Which is hilarious is you’re familiar with Rembrandt’s painting Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC:
I’m not sure how familiar Dopers are with this work of art. Appreciation of the pun requires familiarity – if you gotta explain the joke, it don’t work. Hence my saying thsat if you don’t know it, tough. I’m faniliar with it, so it works for me. Doubtless I’ll be unfamiliar with a lot of the suggestions offered. Tha’s OK. But the joke ought to work with some sizeable population.
My nominees:
1.) “Looking Into Chapman’s Homer: The Physics of Judging a Fly Ball” by Peter Brancazio in American Journal of Physics 53 (9) p. 849-855 (1985). “Chapman” in this case, was the author of an even earlier AJP article from 1968 on baseball. The punning reference is to John Keats’ 1816 sonnet about experiencing George Chapman’s translation of The Odyssey. If you think that’s too highfalutin’, the guys who wrote Bored of the Rings used this as one of the blurbs on the back cover of that parody. Of course, they were from Harvard, where they’re force-fed this stuff.
2.) “Quigley Down Under” on the blog Shadowplay, about the “Barbie Doll Appliance that “Scream Queen” actress Linnea Quigley wore in the 1985 film Return of the Living Dead. The other reference is to Tom Selleck’s 1990 gunslinger-in-Australia film of the same title.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102744/
3.) “The Fight of the Felix” – a 1970 episode of the TV sitcom The Odd Couple in which Felix Unger (Tony Randall) has to face a challenge in the boxing ring. Recalling, of course, Elleston Trevor’s 1964 novel The Flight of the Phoenix and the 1965 movie made from it. (The 2004 remake came later)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0664283/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flight_of_the_Phoenix\_(1965_film)