You know what I mean. Most jokes make us laugh and feel happy, but puns make us feel an unpleasantness that is almost physical.
For instance, while I was at Best Buy the other day, I heard two Geek Squad guys talking. One of them had apparently returned way later than expected from a house call, and his manager seemed kind of annoyed.
Geek Squad Manager: What took you so long?
Geek Squad Grunt: Some dude hacked the lady’s wireless and installed a pretty nasty keylogger trojan thing. She wanted me to find out what all the hacker got, so I took a look at what the keylogger logged and checked all her accounts and stuff.
GSM: And?
GSG: Turned out she did all her banking online, so the hacker had all of that info. He linked it to a PayPal account and pretty much sent himself everything she had.
GSM: Aw hell, that sucks. What did you tell her?
GSG: Well, I’m not much of a people person, you know that. I told her that her network was hacked, that the guy completely cleared out her bank accounts, and when she asked how such a thing was possible, I said it wouldn’t have happened if she’d encrypted her wireless-network traffic.
GSM: What did she do then?
GSG: What do you think she did? She WEP’d.
At this point the manager went kind of slack-jawed, then actually stopped breathing and collapsed. If it wasn’t for a couple of paramedics who were in the place shopping, I’m pretty sure the guy would’ve died.*
So, honestly, why do (the really, really good) puns make you feel like you’ve been punched in the gut? (Honest question; I’m done punning for this post.) For me, at least it feels a lot like disappointment of some sort. Disappointment in myself for not seeing it coming or disappointment that it was “just” word play, maybe. (Though the latter doesn’t make sense, because I obviously love puns.)
Anybody have a theory on the pain of powerful puns?
As for the Geek Squad Grunt, the cops came and took him away in handcuffs. The charge? Assault with a deadly WEP pun.
I’ve never understood the hate for puns. That last footnote was brilliant, by the way. I consider it the highest form of humor, and it’s one of the few that doesn’t necessarily have to be at someone’s expense.
That said, someone who throws too many weak puns at you can get tiresome, especially when they have to shoehorn their meaning into an overly convoluted sentence just for the sake of the pun.
None of that really answers your question, of course, but I like to defend puns when I can.
You don’t think the OP was an overly convoluted dialog contrived for the sake of a pun? Anyway, I can appreciate one or two off the cuff, but when someone is constantly striving to make puns it’s, as you said, annoying, because it seems like they’re not really participating in the conversation at level. It really isn’t all that funny, and the one doing the puns is just trying to get undue attention.
Nope. Granted, the scenario was arbitrarily chosen, but the dialog is more or less natural and makes sense. Puns that fit within the normal flow of language are the best kind. Although I can’t come up with an example of what I’m talking about on the spot, I’m more referring to the sort of thing you see when threads degenerate into punning contests. Syntax and word choice get more and more strained as people try to fit more and more obscure puns into what they’re saying. In a pun-off that’s one thing, but when people insist on doing it in casual conversation, it’s very tiresome and, as you said, shallow. But a single pun, artfully inserted into the flow of conversation such that its existence seems only right and natural, is a thing of beauty.
ETA: I suppose this is all missing the concept of stories told specifically for the purpose of delivering a pun, like the OP’s and the linked one. Those are groaners, but I happen to like them.
From a Jonathan Kellerman (I think, possibly John Sandford) novel I read once, he threw in a factoid that making frequent puns was a sign of mental illness. If that is true, perhaps we react uncomfortably to the presence of madness. I got no reliable cite, though.
I’m always a bit disappointed by puns. It looks like there going to be humor, I’m all mentally rubbing hands in advance, and then there’s just a word, unrelated in meaning, but pronounced about the same. I just don’t see the funny.
It is a kind of humor that actually wins when seen in writing, though, so it is very suitable for messageboards.
I’m pretty unfazed by puns.
I never have groaned, much less fainted.
Most puns are forced, and some are actually not puns at all, just ignorance - like when a kid sees a mother dog and says “There’s a* real bitch*” and then grins at you waiting for a reaction, completely unaware that it isn’t a pun at all to call a mother dog a bitch.
Also, punsters tend to repeat every pun five ways, and it’s always the same joke but they don’t seem to realize that. Uranus sounds like “your anus”, ha ha, and if you change the sentence that goes around the word it sounds that way again, and I’m expected to react again? Don’t hold your breath.
I love puns. A really bad pun will make me groan and continued efforts to make really bad puns can be somewhat painful. Sometimes a good pun makes me groan, too, if I didn’t see it coming or I wished I’d thought of it.
My boyfriend and I are always tossing puns at each other. His are usually really bad. I got him with a good one today, he didn’t even see it coming. We’d just seen Beowulf and we were talking about the rotoscoping that was used for the film and he mentioned them probably not being able to find an actual dragon to rotoscope over for the film. I said that it was too bad since it would have been pretty cheap because dragons work for scale.
I love puns, and I always love being able to sneak them in over the airways. Sometimes they get spotted by others and they get yanked, but every once in a while they fly into the brains of the brilliant members of the audience.
I really enjoy good word play… and a good pun on the fly can be very funny.
What I dislike are people who consider the fact that they stumbled onto a pun to make them the wittiest person in the room. Are constantly searching for any chance to make some sort of play on words and then stare at you with a smarmy leer waiting for you to acknowledge their brilliance.
There’s definitely something of the “sneak attack” in a pun, especially the kind that require a bit of stage setting. In this sense there’s some overlap with at least the more benign forms of practical joke. The “victim” reacts to the relevation of just having been “had”.
It’s not unique to punning. Humor of the old “candid camera” variety (recaptured in recent times by the Jerky Boys & similar routines), if it includes the victim becoming aware of what’s going on (and not just being laughed at for being clueless by the audience), will also take the form of :smack: :smack: :smack: before
