According to Howard Richler on The Senior Times, plenty of well-known and respected individuals have had a go at puns. Like neurologist Sigmund Freud, who thinks that they’re cheap, and the former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States Oliver Wendell Holmes, who thought that puns were “verbicide.” Ouch.
Plenty of English writers living in the 17th and 18th centuries (John Dryden, Daniel Defoe, Joseph Addison, others) thought that puns were ambiguous, created confusion and prevented the English language from finally being perfected.
Though we use the term ‘puns’ quite interchangeably, the fact is, there are many different types of puns. For example, for homophonic puns: the humor lies in the fact that these jokes treat homonyms as though they are synonyms. “Why is it so wet in London? Because so many kings and queens reign there,” is a perfect example of this.
Besides homophonic puns, there are also homographic puns (“Did you hear about the optician who fell into a lens grinder and made a spectacle of himself?”). And if you combine the two, you get homonymic puns: “She was only a rancher’s daughter, but all the horsemen knew her.”
There are also compound puns (“Where do you find giant snails? On the end of giants’ fingers”) and recursive puns, in which the second part of the joke depends on you understanding the first part. An example of this would be: “A Freudian slip is where you say one thing and mean your mother.” What's your favorite types of pun? Let us know in the comments!
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