Knock knock
So I don’t have an answer, nor can I take credit, but from what ailment does uncured ham suffer?
Asterix comics, available in dozens of languaes, made extensive use of “visual” puns that were often language-independent. The verbal puns often had to be totally re-written, not always entirely successfully, in each language. Sometimes, an entire page of dialog had to be re-written just to avoid some puns that they couldn’t translate.
Asterix and Cleopatra in particular includes a lot of visual puns in mock-hieroglyphics. (The entire book is on-line somewhere but I can’t find a good link right now, or I’d cite some examples.)
This is true of any form of humor. There are good jokes and bad jokes.
All the good jokes get told and retold for years and years, but I can’t think of a single pun I’ve heard more than once. They just don’t have a shelf life.
Yeah. If a stream of puns starts on, say, the topic of electricity, you can be sure that someone is going to write, “Hey, don’t get short with me.” Or, if they’re on fire: “Wire you getting short with me?”
While (as Reality_Chuck says) there are good jokes and bad jokes, bad punners roll out witless jokes with depressing, unwarranted, glee. Maybe because the pun feels like their own creation.
When a thread transforms into a pun fest, I start looking for something else to read. However, at SDMB, in the midst of the crap a few talented individuals will devise masterful plays on words.
Overall: better than knock knock jokes.
Aliens are studying humans, and using humor as the tool. All humor is artificially implanted into us. Actualy spontaneoius humor is suppressed by the aliens, lest it confuse the study. And the spontaneous humor is question? puns.
Puns that require a set up, listener patience during buildup, and then rely on a strained linguistic trick–those are crap and serve as a beacon warning, “I am comedically impaired!” Conversational puns, on the other hand, let you gauge pretty quickly what sort of people your dealing with and how quickly and efficiently their minds work. That’s good stuff.
There is a similar thing the missus and I will do, in just about any setting. That is to hear unintended words or phrases when someone else is talking, and the more inappropriate and out of context the better. “You’re in big trouble…” for instance, would get one of us to mutter “urine”. In office meetings we sit across from each other just so we can play the game with each other (eye contact=“you get that one?”) while some bigwig drones on about some deadly boring topic.
I believe it was Mel Brooks who said “Tragedy is when I stub my toe. Comedy is when you fall into an open manhole and die.”
I love pun humour and use it all the time myself. If you get groans, that’s usually because there’s a lack of a sense of humour in your audience and you know to back off.
I’m supposed to back off?!
Oops.
Well, hopefully you don’t pull a Bing Crosby and back right off the stage. 
I asked one of the stagehands to help me out and he asked which way I came in.
Here’s humor at its lowest form. Accept no substitutes.
Hopefully it said “entrance”.
So, if you get groans, you are hilarious and everybody else in the room lacks a sense of humor. Got it.
Straight from the loudest groaner.
You just described about 10% of Pearls Before Swine strips. The odd thing is that a good chunk of the other 90% displays a decent amount of comedic talent.
You get groans from puns because we’re expected to groan.
I actually smile, and laugh at a particularly good one. And lots of puns get laughs from the audience when a comic uses them.
In fact, I think that people say they groan at a pun, when IRL they actually laugh at a good one.
Most of the names were untranslatable. I guess Asterix and Obelix translate well enough at least into English, but what do you with Abraracourcix (based on the French phrase for “cocked arm”) or the Belgium Druid Septantetsix?