Puns - Say that again!

The word snoop - Ursula Dubosarsky 2009

Puns
Say that again!

Knock knock!

Who’s there?

Lena.

Lena who?

Lean a little closer and I’ll tell you.

Do you know what a pun is? If you laughed at this joke, then maybe you do! A pun is a way of using a word (or words) so that it has more than one meaning. So in this joke, Lena is a girl’s name, but it also sounds the same as “lean a.” HAHAHAHA! (You can stop laughing now.)

Puns make us laugh because they take our brains by surprise, like seeing a funny picture when you’re not expecting it. Most knock-knock jokes use puns. Nobody knows who invented the knock-knock joke, but they seem to have begun in the 1950s with school children in South Africa. Now there are millions of them out there. Plenty of other types of jokes use puns as well. See if you can spot the double meanings in the ones on the next page.

Shops and businesses often use puns in their

Q. Why did Cinderella get kicked off

the soccer team?

A. Because she ran away from the ball.

Q. What’s the difference between your

teacher and a train?

A. A train says CHOO CHOO and your

teacher says “SPIT OUT THAT GUM!”

names. A shop that specializes in reading glasses could be called Special-Eyes,for example, or a shop that washes your dog could be The Laundro-Mutt (like Laundromat—get it?). Have you seen some others?

Sometimes writers use puns to make you laugh and think at the same time—the Irish playwright Oscar Wilde was an expert at these sorts of witty puns. Even the title of his most famous play is a pun, The Importance of Being Earnest—Ernest is a man’s name and earnest means “to be honest.”

But puns don’t have to be funny. Another Irishman, Samuel Beckett, loved puns so much he even wrote in one of his very serious novels, “In the beginning was the pun.” (So then what happened?) And in the play Romeo and Julietby William Shakespeare, when one of the characters is dying after being stabbed in a fight he says: “Ask for me tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man.” (Because grave means “serious” as well as—stop laughing, it’s not funny!)

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Be warned, puns won’t always make you popular. The most common response to a good pun is a big GROAN . . . As Lewis Carroll, who was rather fond of puns himself, said:

The Good and Great must ever shun

That reckless and abandoned one

Who stoops to perpetrate a pun.

Anyway, don’t worry about that. Everyone knows that children come up with all the best puns. I bet you can think of plenty.

Have a pun time!