I’ve heard there was once a hair salon called American Hairlines, and their logo was a pair of scissors reminiscent of the old American Airlines eagle logo. Unfortunately this got them a cease and desist letter from AA’s lawyers, and they had to change their name.
Locally, there is (was?) a restaurant named Thai Me Up. And a local electrician’s van is prominently marked with “We do it without shorts!”
Mad Magazine’s spoof of a certain 1972 disaster movie: The Poopsidedown Adventure.
My local horse race track, the Rocky Mountain Turf Club, has at times, referred to itself as, “The Best Little Horse House in the West.”
My favorite Tom Swiftie has always been this: “I dropped the toothpaste,” said Tom, crestfallen.
If what you want is a double entendre, I give you a joke popular in Indiana during the vice-presidency of Dan Quayle (whose wife is Marilyn) shortly after Douglas Ginsburg was rejected for a Supreme Court nomination in short order (after the Bork fiasco) when he was found to have smoked pot in college.
Here is the joke:
Q: What do Marilyn Quayle and Douglas Ginsburg has in common?
.
.
.
A: They’ve both blown a little dope
Also, for double, or maybe even triple meaning, Christopher Hitchens intended title for his book on now-Saint [then Mother] Teresa of Calcutta was “Sacred Cow.” The publishers pulled that title, and it’s actually called *Missionary Position," which is definitely a triple entendre.
You don’t see those in the wild that often-- that is, you once in a while see them invented for a subject chosen because it allows for the pun, but you rarely see one pop up from a subject the situation demands.
In The Musical of Musicals: The Musical!, the Stephen Sondheim spoof is titled “A Little Complex,” which is a quadruple pun on:
- Sondheim’s A Little Night Music,
- “slightly complicated” (a description of the music and lyrics),
- “a small apartment building” (the setting), and
- “a small-scale neurosis” (which each character has).
(Possibly also a nod to the quadruple pun in the title of Sondheim’s Pacific Overtures.)
In the song “The Ballad of Harry Lewis” by the great Alan Sherman, he tells the tale of Harry Lewis who works at Irving Roth cutting fabric. He describes Harry walking through the warehouse “where the Drapes of Roth are stored”.
There was a DIY electronics store near me called Nerdful Things but it’s out of business now.
The movie The Blues Brothers featured a salon called Curl Up & Dye.
Locally, there’s a barbershop called Twisted Scissors (a play on the band Twisted Sister), and there used to be a pet grooming place called Doggy Styles.
In Neil Simon’s Promises, Promises (the musical version of The Apartment), the protagonist frequents a bar run by guy named Roth that’s called The Grapes of Roth.
Two puns I’ve come up with, but haven’t published anywhere (except here, and which I’;m not nominating for an award) are
The Goblin King in The Hobbit is clearly The Benevolent and Protective Elder of the Orcs
After The Blair Witch Project came out, I took to calling it The Boo in the Big Blair House (after the kids’ shoe The Bear in the Big Blue House, which our daughter was watching a lot of at the time. I see that another Doper came up with that pun independently.)
And Portnoy’s Complaint was once nicknamed “The Gripes of Roth.”