Feghoot

"Upon discovering that Miles Black, the famous phrenologist from Yorkshire, was going to take up yodeling to lonely goats in Bali, James White decided to balance four planks of wood on a beer keg and call it an abstract work of art in the style of a famous fourteenth-century architect, just going to prove that people will read any old garbage if they think there will be a good pun at the end of it."

— The Grand Panjandrum's Special Award for Vile Puns, The 2008 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest

A short-short story (300 words on the average), ending in a pun or a punchline that is pretty obviously the only reason for the story's existence. The telling detail in a Feghoot is the groan emitted by readers/listeners when they hit the PUNchline. In essence, an Overly Pre-Prepared Gag in short story form.

Named for the character Ferdinand Feghoot, created by Science Fiction author Reginald Bretnor using the pen name Grendel Briarton. Bretnor chronicled Feghoot's adventures in the multi-year series "Through Time and Space with Ferdinand Feghoot!", in which each installment was a short-short that ended in a horrific pun.

Compare with "Shaggy Dog" Story. A form of Overly Pre-Prepared Gag. See also Collective Groan, which will certainly result if the Feghoot is told well.

Examples:

Comedy

• The Longest Joke in the World, a story of almost 11,000 words, also known by its punchline of "Better Nate Than Lever".
• Larry Lobster and Sam Clam.
• A frog goes into a bank...
• So a big brown bear goes into a bar to order a beer...^note Say that last line fast
• The Rarey Bird.^note It's a long way to Tipperary...
• One joke builds up a convoluted setting on the island of the Trids. The short version is that a hostile giant lives on a mountain in the middle of the island and has a habit of punting Trids to their doom when they try to climb the mountain. Thus, the Trids decide to send a visiting rabbi to negotiate with the giant. Upon reaching the mountaintop, the rabbi encounters the giant and asks "Why Isn't It Attacking?" The giant responds: "Silly rabbi, kicks are for Trids!"
• There's a whole joke sub-genre or meme in Finnish based around Susikoira (Wolfhound) Roi, a Heroic Dog character. The point is always to tell a story that can end with a sentence something like "Few can [description of action ending with a verb ending with "-roi"] like [adverbial] [descriptive noun]-Roi," where the first part of the sentence is a spoonerism of the first. Naturally, these are untranslatable.
  
  For example: A story about how Roi becomes a famous movie star but later falls into disgrace due to his womanising ways and catching venereal diseases, but regains everyone's approval by saving the boat he's on by guiding it through fog raised by the waters being so hot by homing in on the smell of the lady dogs in their destination, prompting the comment:
  "Few can captain in hot weather like syphilis-Roi in heat."
  or "Harva kuumassa kipparoi niin kuin kiimassa kuppa-Roi."
• Dennis Weaver and Hugh Hefner met at Mick Jagger's home for a game of poker. Mick was running late so Dennis and Hugh started playing on their own. As the game progressed, tensions grew as Hefner thought Dennis was cheating. The tensions grew so great that the two started fighting. They tussled on the floor when Mick entered, seeing Hugh sitting on top of Dennis. Mick simply said "Hey, Hugh...get off of McCloud!"
• A New Yorker named Kevin worked for the Central Park Zoo, the Bronx Zoo, and the Prospect Park Zoo. He caught strange and exotic animals for these zoos. The day after he officially retired, Kevin got a call from the Central Park Zoo. "We know you retired yesterday," they said, "but we need to send you to Africa to fetch us a short-necked giraffe!" When Kevin arrived in Africa, who should he see but Tarzan, the legendary king of the apes. He was painting black stripes on a white zebra. "Do you know where there are any short-necked giraffes?" asked Kevin. Tarzan pointed to his left, and there was a whole herd of short-necked giraffes. Three days later, Kevin got a call from the Bronx Zoo. "We know you retired four days ago," they said, "but we need to send you to Africa to fetch us a hornless rhino!" When Kevin arrived in Africa, who should he see but Tarzan, painting white stripes on a black zebra. "Do you know where there are any hornless rhinos?" asked Kevin. Tarzan pointed straight ahead, and there was a whole herd of hornless rhinos. Three days later, Kevin got a call from the Prospect Park Zoo. "We know you retired seven days ago," they said, "but we need to send you to Africa to fetch us a trunkless elephant!" When Kevin arrived in Africa, who should he see but Tarzan, painting black and white stripes on a transparent zebra. "Do you know where there are any trunkless elephants?" asked Kevin. Tarzan pointed to his right, and there was a whole herd of trunkless elephants. Three days later, Kevin cut his phone line and never got any calls from any zoos again. And the moral of the story is, Tarzan stripes forever.
• One joke concerns a man named Steve searching for his friend Bob, who went to Africa to market a soda called Fresca. As he travels through Africa, Steve encounters all manner of locals, missionaries, explorers, etc., drinking Fresca with any food they gather or catch. They all learned from Bob that whatever they're eating "tastes good with Fresca." Eventually, Steve runs across a Cannibal Tribe who ate Bob after buying a bunch of Fresca from him. As the leader explains, "Bob tastes good with Fresca." Horrified, Steve inquires about what exactly the cannibals ate from Bob's body: "You mean you ate his eyes? His legs? His heart?" And so on. The leader explains that yes, all those body parts taste good with Fresca too. Finally:
  Steve: Uh... wait a minute. Wait one minute. You don’t mean to tell me you — you ate his — you know, his, uh, thing?
  Leader: Yes.
  Steve: ...You ate his thing with Fresca?
  Leader: No.
  Steve: Huh? But I thought...
  Leader: Things go better with Coke. (Note: for younger readers, that was an advertising jingle for Coca-Cola in the 1960s.)
• This is a joke that will only make sense to British people of a certain age: A man walks into a seafood restaurant. He goes over to the tank to pick what to eat and asks to have a small light green squid with a tiny moustache. The waiter calls for the cook, Gervais, to grab the squid, kill it and cook it. Gervais takes the squid into the kitchen, grabs a big cleaver, and is about to kill the poor creature when he sees that its eyes are filled with tears of fear. Pitying the poor animal, he goes back to the waiter and says he can't do it. The waiter nods and tells Hans the dishwasher to do it instead. So Hans takes the poor squid, grabs the cleaver, and is about to bring it down, when he too looks at the squid's sad, frightened eyes, and he, too, cannot bring himself to kill the squid. Defeated, the waiter goes back to the customer and says "Well, it just goes to show... Hans that does dishes can be as soft as Gervais, with mild green hairy lip squid!"
• There's an (in)famous Spanish-language joke with a long setup involving a circus coming to a remote town with an act called "EL PAN QUE HABLA" (the bread that talks). The isolated villagers sell out the circus week after week, with lines around the block to see the legendary bread. It all culminates when the ringmaster brings out a slice of bread on a plate with a glass of water. He asks a volunteer to try the bread after pouring the water on it, and asks if it's hard or soft. for non-Spanish speakers, the joke is that the volunteer's response of "it's soft ("está blando") sounds almost identical to "it's talking" ("está hablando").
• The London Philharmonic was performing Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in Berlin. There's a long section of the piece where the bass violins have nothing to do, so one of the bassists suggests they go to the local pub across the street. But one of the bassists says, "But what happens if it's our turn to play." The bassist who suggested it says, "Don't worry. I tied the conductor's score pages together to give us some extra time to sit back down." While they are there, they strike up a conversation with another patron, who himself turns out to be a very famous Count from a nearby province who also happened to be both a Beethoven enthusiast and a bass violin enthusiast. In fact, he was in town as a VIP to watch the Philharmonic's performance and was going to meet with the conductor for dinner after the concert to discuss possibly hosting a second concert at his castle. One thing soon leads to another and after a few hours, bassists are totally wasted, with the Count himself, having had his fill of drinks, commenting that he would have to postpone the dinner with the conductor. This, of course, reminds the bassists that they have a Ninth Symphony to return to, and they stumble back to the concert hall and into their seats. The conductor, who is currently struggling with untying the pages while still keeping the orchestra in time, glares daggers at them as they sit down. One of the trumpeters says, "Boy, that conductor looks pissed." The other trumpeter says, "Well, what do you expect? It's the bottom of the Ninth, the score is tied, the bassists are loaded, and the Count is full!"
• There was once a legendary Viking known as Rudolf the Red. His story started out rather humble, coming from a small clan that focused more on surviving the harsh winters of the North than doing much raiding of their fellow clans, but the one thing they did have was what essentially amounted to the world's earliest form of a meteorologist, a "shaman" who could predict the weather to almost the minute that it would arrive; they used this to their advantage, being able to tell when it was safe for their hunters to go out for food, and when they should take cover from any nasty storms blowing their way. Eventually, they prospered and grew, moving south into (slightly) more temperate climes so they could begin actually acting like Vikings, staging raids along the Eastern English Coast. Rudolf, once an apprentice of the Shaman, soon learned his trade, and used this knowledge himself during his raids, watching the weather patterns—particularly the rain, since the North Sea had a habit of brewing up some truly violent storms to go with it—and would then lead his raiding parties to attack just before and after the rain, knowing that the English villagers and most town guards would be taking cover in their houses, and therefore at their most vulnerable. This method made Rudolf the Red's clan—and by extension Rudolf himself—very rich and famous among other Viking clans, and they earned the nickname "rain-speakers", in honor of their favorite time to strike. Eventually, old Rudolf's axe-arm wasn't what it used to be, and at the urging of his wife, he finally decided to retire, but he never lost his eye for the weather, continuing his studies into meteorological phenomena as a sort of a hobby. One day, he and his wife were sitting at their hut, Rudolf watching the skies as intently as ever. His wife, whom had never much attention to his interests (what with having to take care of the village while he was out a-Viking), looked at him and asked what he was doing. Rudolf, without looking away, said "It's going to rain." This, of course, confused his wife even more, so she asked how he knew, to which Rudolf replied, "Because Rudolf the Red knows rain, dear."

Comic Books

• Pretty much every Iznogoud story.
• One short skit in Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics) had Robotnik making a “criminal” profile of Sonic, just so Sonic could call it a “poortrait” (emphasis his).

Fan Works

• 221B is a Sherlock Holmes fic composed of a series of 221-word segments. One combines this with Continuity Nod; the entire ficlet (in which Holmes and Watson are wandering around the woods) is the setup for Watson quipping that Holmes is "lost period, with or without his Boswell."
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanauthors seem to be fond of these.
  • The fanfic Shipping Sickness is a Cargo Ship story that ends with the following dialogue by Twilight Sparkle to a small table that she had magically brought to life: "I thought maybe I could love you. But you were right. We're not each others' soulmates. We can never be together, not truly. For I am a pony wizardess... and you are just my one nightstand." It's also extremely telling that, while this is a two-part story, the second part is a Rimshot.
    • While that is the biggest groan-inducing pun in the story, there are many others that may cause you to groan or facepalm as well, such as Princess Mi Amore Credenza or her "husband", Shining Armoire.
  • The flash recursive Friendship is Optimal fanfiction "A Shaggy Pony Story" ends with the line "Now is the winter of our disk contents made glorious summer by this sunny 'orse!" The main character being named Feghoof and the title of the story should be sufficient warning to the reader.
  • The Legend of Falling Rocks, Buffalo Brave is a collection of three stories about buffalo mythology, written in the style of Native American legends. As Native American surrogates, Buffalo feature Native American-esque names, though in truth all characters in the My Little Pony universe tend to have strange names by human standards. The first two stories are pretty much what you would expect, and by the third story, any idea that the main character might have a strange name is forgotten. Unfortunately, in the course of the third legend, he goes missing, and the buffalo are forced off their land as a result. However, the buffalo do manage to exact a promise from the ponies that they would keep an eye out for their missing hero, even going so far as to erect signs in the mountains that he disappeared to in search of allies. The signs, of course, beseech the reader to watch for falling rocks.
  • In "The Phantom of the Genre", Rarity and Pinkie Pie are called on to exorcise a ghost from a theater. The ghost isn't malicious, but the cows in the theater orchestra refuse to play in a haunted venue. Pinkie Pie finds a way to keep the bovine band by convincing the ghost to haunt Rarity's chaise lounge instead. As they say, "A herd in the band is worth boo in the tush!"
  • "The Cheek's in the Mail" describes how mailed cheek copying developed as a serious insult, then as a friendly insult, in Equestria before telling of how the griffon king received such a letter right as a treaty between Equestria and Griffonstone was ready to be finalized. Misunderstandings over what the letter meant ensued, culminating in Luna making a colossal tapestry of her butt to persuade the king of the lack of seriousness in the letter. In the end, the treaty went off without a hitch, but due to how unstable the griffon king was, it's noted that this happy ending was highly unlikely and could only occur once in a blue moon.
  • Triptych Continuum: In Dear Friend, Spike gets a spam flood, and the story ends on a pun on spam (canned meat):
    And Twilight never let Spike eat griffon-made canned lunch meat again.
  • Early on in Manehattan's Lone Guardian, discussion is made of the Lonely Heart Nightclub and how mediocre it is as an establishment. It is then pointed out that for all of its flaws, ponies still rated it higher than a certain other nightclub in the area:
    "Yes, the owner of the Lonely Heart was much better than the owner of the Broken Heart."
• The Legend of Korra fanfiction "The Last Heist" is a story set in the future about Kai stealing money to buy a wedding ring for Jinora. His victim hires the Triple Threats to kill him. The first chapter finished with Kai's death and the line "He was all I needed...I loved him, and he had changed and grown so much from when I met him on the streets...and now he's on a Kai-way to Hell..."
  • The second chapter is just a paragraph about the leader of the assassins telling his men to return to their employer's company. The first name of Kai's victim and his company put together is "Bahdumm Tisse".
• "A Shaggy Faunus Story" is a RWBY fanfic about a snake faunus (named Pheghiss) dating Velvet the rabbit faunus. Weiss gets jealous, and eventually confesses her feelings to the snake boy at the end of the story, only for him to reply that "I'm sorry Weiss, but this anaconda DON'T, this anaconda DON'T, this anaconda DON'T want none unless if you are a BUN, HON!"
• The Stargate SG-1 fanfiction "Hero of the Soviet Union" spends several pages detailing the operation of a Soviet-run SGC, all to set up the punchline when a KGB major mocks a captured Goa'uld: "In Soviet Russia, gods bow to you!"
• Stained Glass Shade, a Daria and Osamu Tezuka Crossover fanfic in which recurring star system character Lampe finds out that an actress he had a brief fling with gave birth to a daughter shortly after moving to America. Said daughter turns out to be Tiffany.
• The Good Omens fic ask, and ye shall receive has Crowley repeatedly tell God to smite him with increasing anger and desperation until the ending where he meets Aziraphale in the Garden of Eden and God says smugly, "There. You're smitten."
• Unexpected Talent has Harry and Hermione find he has a bizarre talent to unhinge his jaw like a snake and swallow packages to teleport them to their destination because he's a parcelmouth.
• Harry Potter and the Garden has Harry concealing a unique talent with plants that got him and his friends through many scrapes, though his friends couldn’t quite figure out how he did it. It isn’t until his final confrontation with Voldemort, where he is able to use a mandrake to take down the wizard, that Professor Sprout realizes in awe that he is the Badger’s Heir: a parsleymouth.
• Chili and the Chocolate Factory: Fudge Revelation goes on for about 80,000 words of alternately delightful and horrifying insanity while throwing in references to as many Roald Dahl stories as possible before having a thoroughly insane pun as a punchline.
• Starscream And The Drones is a short story about Megatron wanting to replace his treacherous second-in-command Starscream with several drones that do whatever they're told. The fic spends a lot of time describing Starscream leading the drones to a cliff, ordering each drone to go to a specific spot and hold a unique silly pose while jumping off, then surveying the wreckage before instructing the next one. When Megatron eventually catches on and goes out to ask Starscream what he's doing, the latter replies that he's playing Tetris.

Films — Live-Action

• The Court Jester. Pretty much the whole point of "The Maladjusted Jester" is to lead up to the pun: "And a jester unemployed is nobody's fool!"^note To those who don't know, the word "fool" used to be used to mean "jester".
• The entirety of Wavelength (1967) is a slow zoom-in on a photo of ocean waves; the film is literally about the length between the camera and the "waves".

Literature

• Isaac Asimov wrote several stories that are more or less excuses for ending with tortured puns:
  • "Battle Hymn" is ostensibly about someone trying to influence the outcome of a vote by Mars colonists on whether to allow Mars to be used as a location for potentially dangerous hyperspace experiments. To counter the other side's jingle (No, No, A Thousand Times No), they get the colonists, who were of French descent (but don't speak the language any more), all singing the French national anthem. It works, because although they don't really understand the lyrics, they know the title: Mars say yea!
  • "Death Of A Foy": At the end, the eponymous Starfish Alien, having been tricked into believing that giving his large-sized hearts will lead to a doctor playing a choir for him as his soul returns to his homeworld, wills, "Give my big hearts to Maude, Dwayne. Dismember me for Harold's choir. Tell all the Foys on Sortibackenstrete that I will soon be there".
  • "Dreamworld": A boy who reads a lot of science fiction and keeps telling his uninterested Aunt Clara about the crazy science-fiction inspired dreams he keeps having. His aunt keeps telling him that he has to face reality, or else, one day, he'll be stuck in one of his dreams and unable to wake up. The next time he goes to sleep, he has a dream in which hundreds of giant-sized duplicates of his Aunt Clara are all chasing him and demanding that he face reality. He desperately hopes that he'll be able to wake up from this dream, or else he'll have suffered the worst science-fictional doom of all: being trapped in a world of giant aunts.
  • "The Hazing": The whole story builds up to a punchline to showcase Humanity Is Insane, because despite advancing to a "civilized" level of technology, they admit that most of their species is still psychologically primitive.
    Forase: "You screwball Earthmen! At least, this little episode has taught us all one thing."
    Williams: "What's that?"
    Forase: "Never [...] get tough with a bunch of nuts. They may be nuttier than you think!"
  • "A Loint Of Paw": This concerns a man who, after stealing several hundred thousand dollars, used a time machine to travel to the day after the statute of limitations expired. After the prosecutor and defense attorney finish arguing, the judge renders his decision: "A niche in time saves Stein."
  • "My Son, the Physicist": The story builds up suspense with the chaos, expectation of dangerous aliens, and lost spacemen, and ends with a common instruction given to young children; listen to your mother.
  • "Shah Guido G": A particularly notorious story, although arguably the title gives fair warning.
  • "Sure Thing": In a race between alien pets, Sloane's pet rock Teddy crosses the line first when it suddenly displays the ability to teleport. Yes, "Sloane's Teddy wins the race."
  • "The Watery Place": The whole story is a joke at the similarity in sound/description between Venus and Venice. Sheriff Cameron confuses Venus for Venice, since both places might be called "the watery place".
• Arthur C. Clarke wrote the two pager, "Neutron Tide", about a spaceship passing too close to a neutron star and being ripped apart by the huge tidal forces in order to facilitate a pun about the single piece from the astronaut's toolkit that was found in the wreckage. It was a "Star-mangled spanner."
• Spider Robinson wrote a collection of short stories that started with Callahan's Crosstime Saloon, all taking place in the eponymous Weirdness Magnet Inn Between the Worlds. Slightly different from the normal format, the stories are weird little philosophical pieces with puns in several places. One of the things they do there is have Tall Tales Night to see who can tell the most outrageous shaggy dog story with the worst pun-filled punchline.
• Gravity's Rainbow is a long story, but it has digressions within it to go off on long tangents crossing half a dozen pages about something like the fur trade just so that it can abruptly end in a pun. For instance, on page 563 there's a pun on the song "Forty Million Frenchmen can't be wrong". For De Mille, young fur—henchmen can't be rowing.
• Athyra has an extended digression about the difference between the kind of flax used to make salad and the kind of flax used to make linen, all so Brust can sneak in the line, "The true, true salad flax would melt..."
• "The Casque of Lamont T. Yado" by Victor Milan is a short story rather transparently based on Edgar Allan Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado", which you'll recall ends with the words "For the love of God, Montresor!". The hero blames the villain for the death of his shipmates, but has agreed to help him steal the eponymous casque — an alien time-controlling helmet. The villain, incidentally, is a "tracer" who can teleport by tracing lines of force, and attributes his powers to "Tracergod". He also affects a Jamaican accent and says things like "mon" instead of "man". After they have succeeded in teleporting the casque out of its secure location, the villain puts it on, believing that it will give him superhuman speed. Instead, he finds himself inexorably slowing down — the hero has reprogrammed the helmet to freeze the villain like a statue for eternity. The very last thing the villain is able to say before his speech grinds to a halt is "For the love of Tracergod, mon!"
• Roger Zelazny liked to sneak these into his works. For example, the entire second chapter of his Hugo-winning novel Lord of Light is an elaborate setup allowing him to finish with the final line "Then the fit hit the Shan." In fact, the whole purpose behind his novel A Night in the Lonesome October is this trope.
• Unwind has an in-universe example, an urban legend about a boy whose surname was Dunfee, and whose first name began with an H, but who will always be known as Humphrey. His father was one of the strongest advocates of the policy of using Delinquents for organ transplants, so when he started to misbehave in school, his father was pressured into having him "unwound." Mr. Dunfee eventually snapped, and started hunting down and reclaiming all the donated organs — but "all the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put Humphrey back together again." (It later turns out that this story isn't wholly inaccurate, and the story ends with a reunion of all the people who received the boy's organs.)
• The infamous Marquis de Sade, known for works of a questionable nature, once took the time out of his busy schedule to write a story about a man cheating on his wife with a nun, and claiming that since nuns are dedicated to God, surely this is a method of unlocking the gates of heaven. The man's wife, after sleeping with a priest, comments that it must have worked, because she'd never seen a bigger key.
• "Flush Fiction", the Uncle John's Bathroom Reader book featuring a lot of short stories, has a feghoot about an ugly boy, Tool, and his attempt to impress a beautiful girl, Honey, by joining some pirates. In the end, the pun is "A Tool and his Honey are soon parted."
• In John Dies at the End, Amy tells Dave about an incident of Spontaneous Human Combustion:
  "I have a friend, Dana, who was in the grocery store one day, and her arm, like, bursts into flame. Just like that. Just her arm. And she's screaming and waving her arm around and around, flames shooting everywhere. Finally the cops showed up and arrested her."
  "Arrested her? Why did—"
  "Possession of an unlicensed firearm."
  A great, heavy silence settled over the room. She looked down at the table again, a smile playing at her lips, looking extraordinarily pleased with herself.
  I said, "You know, in the Middle East, a woman can be flogged for telling a story like that."
• Robert J. Sawyer's The Good Doctor with Isaac Asimov as the pun.
• Marilyn Manson's autobiography The Long Hard Road Out of Hell featured an entire chapter about a girl he dated who had an unusual circular birthmark around her vagina. Though many events happen during this chapter, he does close it by stating that someone else he knew started dating her and "snatched her away like a greedy little Hobbit and indeed became the Lord of the Ring."
• "A Clockwork Lemon" (warning: PDF), attributed to A. Bertram Chandler, is a tale of a dystopian future where fuel shortages have resulted in automobiles being made of clockwork and delivered by airship. When one such airship must jettison its cargo, a spectator on a nearby rooftop warns, "Take cover! It's raining Datsun cogs!"
• The Mensa Puzzle Book has a series of these which are turned into puzzles by presenting the story and asking the reader to guess the punchline.
• The Science Fiction YA novel Gemina features a dark twist on this type of story. One of the Mooks starts telling a "joke" to his comrades. It's about a man who travels to a foreign land and stops in this little bar, but every time he tries to drink a beer, the bartender sounds an alert and screams "The wolves are coming!" Everyone runs and hides, and every time they come back the traveler's glass is empty. Finally fed up, the traveler refuses to join everyone else in the cellar, arguing with the bartender until he's left alone to enjoy his beer in peace. The "punchline": "Then the wolves came. And they ate him. And drank his beer." It's creepy in context, especially due to the surrounding circumstances.
• One of Alan Dean Foster's Mad Amos Malone stories has the mystical mountain man and a Snake Oil Salesman named Sam both asked by a group of farmers to try to purify a plot of cursed earth so they can farm it. After the two compete with demonstrations of magical produce growing, Amos warns the farmers that the land's curse is too strong, and bad things will happen if they don't leave it alone. Sam assures them he can fix it (and he's cheaper than Amos) so they hire him. After Amos leaves, Sam says that if anything does go wrong with the land, they can tell everyone that it's his fault. His fault, or his name's not Sam Andreas.
• The short story "Too Far," by Fredric Brown, involves a womanizing scoundrel who turns himself into a deer, and attempts to seduce a local doe. She takes exception to this, and makes the change permanent—being of a magical persuasion herself. Whenever they cross paths in the future, and he asks her to lift the enchantment, she replies that she "wants to keep the first buck she ever made."
• Bred Any Good Rooks Lately?: A Collection of Puns, Shaggy Dogs, Spoonerisms, Feghoots & Malappropriate Stories is an anthology gathered by James Charlton, and is full of short stories that all end with spoonerisms or other puns. The title comes from the last line of "For the Birds", a humorous short story contributed by none other than Stephen King.
• "Alien Cornucopia" by Walt Liebscher tells of an Eldritch Abomination called Splend who comes to Earth and demands thousands of human females as concubines; the women all go with him quite willingly, and somewhere off in space, Splend is a many-lovered thing.

Live Action TV

• In Red Dwarf, Lister tells one to Rimmer:
  Lister: My mate Petersen once brought a pair of shoes with artificial intelligence. Smart Shoes, they were called. It was a neat idea. No matter how blind drunk you were, they would always get you home. Then he got ratted one night in Oslo, and woke up the next morning in Burma. See, the shoes got bored just going from his local to the flat. They wanted to see the world, man, y'know? He had a helluva job getting rid of them. No matter who he sold them to, they'd show up again the next day! He tried to shut them out, but they just kicked the door down, y'know?
  Rimmer: Is this true?
  Lister: Yeah! Last thing he heard, they'd sort of, erm, robbed a car and drove it into a canal. They couldn't steer, y'see.
  Rimmer: Really?!
  Lister: Yeah. Petersen was really, really blown away by it. He went to see a priest. The priest told him, he said, it was alright, and all that, and the shoes were happy, and they'd gone to heaven. Y'see, it turns out shoes have soles.
  • Rimmer then asks "How did they open the car door?"
• Star Trek: The Original Series: The "no tribble at all" line in the famous episode "The Trouble With Tribbles" seems to count.
• In Whose Line Is It Anyway?, Colin usually starts off games of Weird Newscasters with one of these.
  Colin: Convicted hit man Jimmy Two-Shoes McClarty confessed today that he was once hired to beat a cow to death in a rice field using only two small porcelain figures. Police admit that this is may be the first known case of a knick knack paddy whack.
  • This is one of the best:
    Colin: Famous playboy Hugh Hefner managed to successfully stop an order of monks from operating a business on his property. The police forced the friars to close down their stall, which was outside the Playboy Mansion, where they had been selling flowers. Said one friar, "Well, if it was anyone else we might have gotten away with it, but unfortunately, only Hugh can prevent florist friars."
  • In one particular game of Greatest Hits, Colin mocked Ryan's Pun segues by coming up with a few of his own, ending with:
    Colin: When I was a jockey [Ryan scoffs] No, I was, just for a little while. In my bed - well, it was more of a cot - we had this sort of sanitary paper for the fillies. Wait a minute... bed cot filly papers? Red Hot Chili Peppers!
  • More examples can be seen on the Overly Prepared Gag page.
  • Similar to the Colin Mochrie example, but predating it, The Two Ronnies often did these as one of their fake news stories.
• Mystery Science Theater 3000 had a sketch from "The Sword and the Dragon" episode called "A Joke by Ingmar Bergman". Servo and Crow walk along a pier, counting the wooden boards and the slits between them, until they reach the end and Servo falls in. Crow summarizes, "When you're out of slits, you're out of pier." This is a play on an old beer commercial tagline, "When you're out of Schlitz, you're out of beer." In true Ingmar Bergman style, it's all black and white with almost no dialog or action, and has a length of over four minutes.
• One episode of The Flip Wilson Show began with Flip telling a long story about a man who gained fame by picking a berry, which he then gave to his wife, until two men came to steal the berry, saying "We've come to seize her berry, not to praise it."
• The Soviet series Seventeen Moments of Spring spawned a great many jokes and anecdotes due to the Fountain of Memes nature of the series, and about half of them are feghoots. Unfortunately, almost none of the puns translate well into English. Some of them just might work in translation. An example:
  Stierlitz was struck by a bullet in the nape.
  "An explosive bullet," flashed through his head.
• Pee-wee Herman delivered one during an 1984 appearance on Late Night with David Letterman.
• The Muppet Show: The Peter Ustinov episode had a skit where Ustinov tells Fozzie a rambling story about a man named Benny who was told he would live forever if he never shaved his beard. When he tried to shave for the sake of love, he was turned into a Grecian urn. The moral of the story: A Benny shaved is a Benny urned.
• Small Wonder: One of the later episodes pits two robotic children against one another- the protagonist Vicki, and Russian rival Vladimir Godunov. At the very end, Vladimir's robotic nature is exposed, and his creator is left to protest "You couldn't leave Godunov alone?" That one was so bad, even the studio audience could only moan at it.
• An episode of Frasier brings to a climax a plot-line involving Daphne developing an eating disorder and putting on a lot of weight^note which was actually an attempt at Hide Your Pregnancy for the actress, which everyone except Niles notices and awkwardly tries to avoid bringing up. When there is a confrontation at the end of the episode, Daphne ends up slipping and being unable to get back up under her own strength, leading Frasier, Niles and Martin^note who, for the unaware, have the family name 'Crane' to try and help her. While they're doing so, Martin is struck by a thought: "Hey Daphne, I just realised something. It took three Cranes to lift you!" Everyone glares at him.
• Quite a few of Dave Gorman's stories on Modern Life Is Goodish are eventually revealed as feghoots, or at least turned into feghoots by the addition of a terrible pun at the end, usually to groans from the studio audience.
• Played for drama- in the Black Mirror serial "Playtest", a young man is asked to test an up-and-coming horror game that adapts to the player's fears. Unfortunately, the game zeroes in on his deepest fears and plays mind games with him that way; he has to deal with his id, his fears of Alzheimer's, and many other horrors. The game even fakes him out of leaving twice— and the third, most sobering exit, where he sees his mother in the exact same Alzheimer's fate he feared, was a fakeout as well. In reality, he never left the game, much less started it; he was killed when his phone's signal interfered with the system, frying his brain. After convulsing and calling out to his ailing mother in vain, the staff cooly sits and writes down his final moments: "Called 'Mom'".
• Most episodes of Welcome Back, Kotter begin and end with Gabe telling one of these, couched as a story about a family member, usually to Julie. Her reactions range from enthusiastic amusement to weary resignation to strong annoyance. Occasionally other characters get in on the fun, either as victims or storytellers.
• One segment of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver on lethal injection is interrupted thrice to compare said execution method to "planning to have sex with your mother". The ending shows that he chose to do that to say that "That was a long way to say that if we choose to continue killing people that way, we're some real motherfuckers!".
• F Troop has the Hekawi tribe of Native Americans, whose name is a G-rated version of an old Feghoot variously told about either Native Americans or Africans. The original plan was to call them the Fugawi tribe, but censors spotted that one before it could air.
  Chief Wild Eagle: Many moons ago tribe move west because Pilgrims ruin neighborhood. Tribe travel west, over country and mountains and wild streams, then come big day... tribe fall over cliff, that when Hekawi get name. Medicine man say to my ancestor, 'I think we lost. Where the heck are we?'
• Quincy, M.E. once spent a whole 45-minute episode on the investigation of how a man died of radiation poisoning courtesy of an X-ray machine used in construction, all to set up Quincy's last-second pun on the surname of the killers: "You've known [whodunnit] for years! The Butlers did it."
• The Weekly with Charlie Pickering: A segment on National Security has Charlie looking at how Prime Minister Tony Abbott had been appearing at press conferences surrounded by increasing numbers of Australian flags, suggesting that he awards himself two extra flags when he believes he's made the country safer. Charlie then examines a string of gaffes connected to the inquiry into the Lindt Cafe Siege, penalising Abbott two flags at a time until there's none left.
  Charlie: Failing to immediately correct the Parliamentary record despite your office knowing Parliament had been misled? You're out of flags, Prime Minister. [The remaining flags are removed in the graphic.] Luckily, he doesn't pay attention to the poles. [The audience responds with a combination of laughter, applause and groaning.]
• The Restaurant Sketch from Monty Python's Flying Circus featured the waiter, head waiter and manager (played by Terry Jones, Michael Palin and Eric Idle, respectively) and offering numerous apologies regarding a dirty fork, brought to their attention by a man played as Graham Chapman. After a few minutes of brief chaos, Chapman wraps it up by saying: "lucky we didn't say anything about the dirty knife." Cue the crowd booing, much to Chapman's protests.

Magazines

• Amazing Stories:
  • The magazine had a regular contribution called "Through Time and Space with Benedict Breadfruit" by Grandall Barretton (a pseudonym for Randall Garrett) which were all Feghoots that used the names of other well known science fiction writers.
  • A later Briarton story had somebody ask Feghoot if Breadfruit could be trusted. "Absolutely," replied Feghoot. "He was conceived in our Garrett."

Music

• In P.D.Q. Bach's "Knock, Knock" cantata, the fourth and last movement has the recitative telling the story of an aquarium worker being ordered to catch some baby seagulls and bring them back immediately in order to stop indecent acts from going on in the dolphin tank. Walking his way back, the worker steps over a drowsy lion that recently escaped from the zoo, and a policeman suddenly appears to arrest him. The punchline (sung by the chorus) gives the charge: "Transporting young gulls across a staid lion for immoral porpoises."
• Joe Nichols' "Revelation" is about a nightmare involving the Second Coming; the song ends, "If I never go to Hell, Lord, it'll be because you scared it out of me."
• Barry Cryer and Ronnie Golden's song "Flamenco" ends rather abruptly with the heroine being crushed in a revolving door by separatists. The moral of the story: Never put all your Basques in one exit.
• The children's song "Little Bunny Foo Foo" ends with Foo Foo turned into a goon (whatever that is) after pissing off the Good Fairy one too many times. The moral of the story: Hare today, goon tomorrow.
• In Blues Traveler's song, "Hook," a song written for the purpose of criticizing popular music, vocalist John Popper explains in the second verse that everything he sings is insincere. The word "hook" is used to refer to a musical hook throughout the song, but by this verse, he confuses the listener once he starts making allusions to Peter Pan: "To confuse the issue I'll refer / To familiar heroes from long ago / No matter how much Peter loved her / What made the Pan refuse to grow..." Staying a child meant Peter Pan could never be with Wendy, but growing up meant he would never again battle with Hook, tricking the listener into believing there will be some kind of deep poetic reason for why Peter chose to stay with Hook instead, but it instead leads effortlessly into the chorus with this lame dad joke: "...was that the Hook that brings you back."

Newspaper Comics

• Pearls Before Swine has countless examples, mostly spoken by Rat to set up the strip's trademark Puns. And they're almost always followed with some kind of Self-Deprecation involving Rat — though sometimes he's replaced by Goat or even Pig — belittling the author for bothering to make such a pun. Defied in one strip: Goat starts to tell a story, only for Rat to tell him to hold on a minute, and then goes to preemptively clobber Stephen with a baseball bat.
• Dilbert:
  • The arc that introduced Bob and Dawn had them discussing the theory that a meteor killed the dinosaurs, which Bob says was greatly exaggerated. It did land on one dinosaur; he actually survived, but as you might imagine, it took a lot of expensive medical treatment. Poor Larry was eventually recognized as the first member of a new species, the doctor-billed flattypuss.
  • Another strip had Dogbert get Dilbert to discuss a marine biologist relative of his, who won awards for breeding sea anemones, but had little time for a social life. Dogbert wisely gets out of slapping range before delivering the punchline:
    Dogbert: With anemones like that, who needs friends?
  • The N's don't justify the "neans".
  • Your Bart is worse than your bike.
  • You should not judge a cook by its brother.
• These two Get Fuzzy strips.
• This◊ Foxtrot strip. It's worth mentioning that all the non-PBS examples were either a Shout-Out to Pearls' use of this or had the similarity to Pearls pointed out in at least one comment.
• B.C. had a 1995 strip in which an inventor demonstrates a new, expensive model of unicycle equipped with brakes that allow a rider to pull up safely short of a bunch of tacks. The final panel had someone chanting, "Tacks brakes for the rich!"
• Peanuts featured a long story arc of Snoopy on a mission from the Head Beagle to rescue an operative named Thompson from trouble with rabbits all leading up to the mission summary, rabbit-tat-tat and it was all over.

Radio

• Right Between The Ears has a recurring sketch called "The Casebook Of Mobile Holmes", which is basically a setup of bad puns done in Sherlock Holmes style. This pretty much ends up with a Feghoot like this:
  • Mobile wanted the rest of the gang to take a plumbing course in Egypt: "Yes, we'll all be pharaoh faucet majors."
  • Or in a case about a general who was looking for his brother's ziggurat but died because it was on fire: "The searching general has proven that smoking ziggurats can be hazardous to your health."
• In later seasons of My Word!, the final round consisted of Frank Muir and Denis Norden each telling a convoluted shaggy dog story that ended with a pun based on a famous phrase or quotation. Muir and Norden later compiled several volumes of books containing some of the My Word! stories. Examples included Norden's explanation of how he worked his exit from the army with pedantically exact interpretations of his superior officers' orders ("Brief on 'shun' is better than QR" (that is, Queen's Regulations) - "prevention is better than cure"), and Muir's account of his desperately scouring the contents of his neighbour's greenhouse, having bet him £50 that he could work them into a My Word! story ("A snipe, a harp, a fern, corn, seeded trayfuls" - "a snapper up of unconsidered trifles").
• Take this trope and stretch it out to 25 minutes with musical interludes, potshots at the BBC, brandy, shorter sub-feghoots existing solely to put in awful puns, Insane Troll Logic, and silly noises, and you've got The Goon Show and quite possibly a hangover.

Video Games

• Antimatter Dimensions: One news ticker is a vignette about someone starting a soccer team of ants with their aunt Diana, ending with '"How can we make this ant team matter?" Di mentions.' (The last few words are a homophone for "Antimatter Dimensions".)
• Deekin tells one in Neverwinter Nights: Shadows of Undrentide during a break in the action. It is a story of a cruel monarch's interrogator whose favorite method of torture is to chop the fingers off of a prisoner with a hatchet one by one until he confesses. The monarch captures a count who was accused of plotting rebellion against him and takes him down to the dungeon where the interrogator cuts off first his fingers, then his toes. The count remains silent. The monarch is so impressed that he orders the interrogator to give him a quick death, but as the hatchet swings for his neck, the count finally cracks. By then, it is too late and his head is severed from his body. The moral of the story: Never hatchet counts before they chicken!
• In Baldur's Gate 2, a drow NPC in Ust Natha tells the story of the first drow, and how they all lived in reed huts before they'd learned how to mine stone properly. One day, the followers of their greatest matron mother raided a neighbouring dwarf kingdom, taking as plunder the dwarf king's solid stone seat. Intending to surprise their matron with the plunder, they secretly stored the seat in her hut's attic, where it sank through the reed floor and onto the matron below, squishing her flat and proving that you should never stow thrones in grass houses. One of the other drow in the audience tries to kill him for it.
• The entirety of Can Your Pet?, a short Flash Game that ends with your pet chicken being turned into canned food.
• Professor Sycamore in Professor Layton and the Azran Legacy provides one that ends with the punchline "Never judge a buck by its mother." The character he tells the joke to doesn't get it, but takes it on as valuable life advice.
• In Star Wars: Rebel Assault 2, one Easter Egg allows you to access an alternate subtitle track, filled with jokes. One of these involves a story about a tribe that worshipped the sun god, and killed the evil witch Sybil, then danced in celebration holding her severed head. The sun god was displeased, and struck them down, because you should never end a sundance with a dangling part of Sybil.
• Squid Ink: The entirety of Goth's mission storyline is a "Scooby-Doo" Hoax by a squid farmer pretending to be a ghost in order to scare squids back to his farm. When he's finally revealed and outed by Goth the squid, the story ends with the punchline: "and he would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for that meddling squid!"
• The first story in Tales of the Wild Zeep involves butterflies flying into the Wild Zeep's mouth and down his throat prior to a performance in a play, just so the narrator can make a joke about him having "butterflies in his stomach" on the last page. More bizarrely, it's the only story out of the three that does this, making the other two just straight-up Shaggy Dog Stories.
• Team Fortress 2: The "Meet the Soldier" video depicts the titular Soldier doing this unintentionally while giving a rambling anecdote/pep-talk to a bunch of apparent recruits (which turn out to actually be a bunch of severed enemy heads lined up on a fence), in which he confuses Sun Tzu with Noah, culminating with Sun taking two of every animal onto a boat and "[beating] the crap out of every single one!". He then concludes his story with "And from that day forward, any time a bunch of animals are in one place, it's called a Tzu!" (zoo)^*"Unless it's a farm!".

Webcomics

• qxlkbh: 76: filler comic is a four panel comic which is just a setup to a pun.
• xkcd:
  • One strip showed us you can do it in a math paper.
• Irregular Webcomic! does this once every 100 strips with Lambert the Hobbit's stories about his uncle Bilbert.
• Narbonic has one, complete with a self-deprecating lesson about the dangers of irresponsible punning along the side of the main text.
• Buttersafe gave us the story of how a certain bird found its place in the world.
• Times Like This has Cassie tell the story of classmate Eli, who joined the band Cake. Done as a Shout-Out to Pearls Before Swine.
• The U2-themed webcomic Achtoon Baby, hosted on the fan site @U2, gives us "the best U2 joke (the author) has ever heard", a convoluted story involving a partial breakup of the band and special appearances by Phil Collins and Paul McCartney. Even worse for the uninitiated: the eventual punchline is meaningless unless you know the lyrics to "Running to Stand Still" from The Joshua Tree. The joke is explained in the last panel for those that really can't figure it out.
• This page from Square Root of Minus Garfield recolors the characters. The author's comments are an in-depth examination of what issues and implications a sudden change in Garfield's color might bring with it. It ends with the statement that there is more than one way to skin a cat.
• This page of Erfworld.
• Starting around 2019, Rae the Doe has gotten an increasingly large number of its punchlines from four-panel Feghoots, although few quite reach the level of comic #300.
• Basic Instructions had a strip in which Rick defends a Zombie Apocalypse as being a Utopia - after all, when Zombies rule the world, "Everyone will be valued for their brains."
• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal:
  • A comic about anthropomorphic knot detectives ends in one of them being betrayed and shot by the other, who removes his disguise revealing he's "a frayed knot".
  • One comic is about a man talking very solemnly about the emotional pain he experiences when he remembers he feels more at home when he's drunk at the local pub than anywhere he's ever lived sober. Or, as he sums up: "A man walks into a bar and says, 'ouch!'" Arguably invoked, as everyone thought he was leading into a joke since he started his rant with "A man walks into a bar".
  • This groaner involves an affair set up in-universe entirely for the purposes of making a terrible math pun on the basic algebraic phrase "There exists an x (variable) such that y (input) is z (outcome, pronounced 'zed' in British English)."
• Nip and Tuck has the "Whehthehekawee" Native American tribe, an homage to the same Feghoot that spawned the Hekawi of F Troop.
• Thinking Too Much to Think Positively: In "Pride Crossover", Pandora appears in several pride-flag-themed outfits with her name changed accordingly ("Bidora", etc)... until the asexual Pandora, "Adora", is instead an asexual-themed Adora.
• In The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob!, Jean reacts with Fourth Wall-leaning horror when she realizes that the entirety of a multi-year long story arc has just been leading up to a terrible, terrible pun.

Web Original

• Entries in the "Vile Puns" category of the yearly Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest tend to consist mostly of these. The page quote is a subversion.
  • Possibly Parler trick
• Yahtzee has admitted to doing this with a few Zero Punctuation episodes:
  • From Red Faction: Guerrilla: "...which is less guerrilla and more chimpanzee! (spent years working on that last pun)"
  • From Mass Effect and the controversial sex scene: "...it's hardly going to make your mass erect. (yes, the whole review was leading up to that terrible pun in the end)"
• 365 Tomorrows's flash story: HollowPlanet.
• David Wong's essay on the Monkeysphere has one involving Charles Darwin.
• The StarCraft caster Day[9] once made a video in which he described his 'ideal sci-fi series'. One wonders how he kept a straight face for that long...
• Max Gilardi's "Tarantino's New Business" toon is about Quentin Tarantino opening a morgue exclusively for black people. While there are a lot of jokes throughout the cartoon, for the most part the whole thing seems to just be a set up to have Quentin say "Because storing dead niggers is my fucking business, that's why!"
• SCP Foundation has a few of these as tales and as joke SCPs
  • SCP-649-2568-J is a snake that is compelled to tell the truth when asked a question, and causes changes to geological surfaces it finds too short. Because "I like big buttes and I cannot lie." (there are two Stealth Puns in the build-up: the snake is an anaconda, and the number spells MIX-ALOT). Should be noted that basically everyone in the comments page gives a grudging upvote / Lame Pun Reaction.
  • SCP-0002-j is a talking toilet that wants to write a book about his life because he's seen some shit.
  • Dr. Palanez's Proposal is written in the style of an SCP-001 proposal (as the site does not have a defined SCP-001, but rather multiple "proposals" with one, all, or none of them being the true SCP-001) regarding a phenomenon affecting Palanez, particularly when in contact with a certain fellow researcher. The last lines of the document make it clear that it is, in fact, a marriage proposal instead.
  • SCP-9999-J describes a scenario where all sorts of meats and eventually living bovines start mysteriously levitating high into the upper atmosphere, forcing the Foundation, various world leaders, and various GOIs to hold a meeting discussing the flying beef. O5-1 states that they don't want to strongarm the others into helping find a solution, however in their words, "But what choice do I have when the steaks are this high?"
  • The 12 Days of Site 87's Christmas takes place over the course of twelve days before Christmas 2014, and involves the Krampus, a magical Christmas tree that makes its own ornamentation, and a fight between the two of them. In the final fight between the Tree and the Krampus, one Dr. Partridge gets knocked on his ass by a blast from the former, and transformed into, as one of the characters puts it, "A small tree of the genus Pyrus." In other words, Dr. Partridge is a Pear Tree.
  • Again, in Happy Howlidays, which involves a werewolf Santa of all things. Said Werewolf Santa followed throughout the story by a character named Virginia, and eventually ends up concussing a Foundation researcher and a claw shot off by a sniper before dying. After the fact, the delirious, concussed researcher finds the claw and proclaims, "Yes, Virginia, There's Santa Claws."
  • Although it isn't pun SCP-3305 turns out to all just be an elaborate build up to the joke at the end.
  • SCP-5987 is an unusual Downplayed example, as it's an entity known as the Sirenhead, whose physical description is obfuscated through notes and file updates, before it's revealed to be... a sculpture of a siren used as the figurehead of a ship (with anomalous, hypnotic properties to boot). The Bait-and-Switch of this comes from the fact that there's a much more famous "Siren Head" among internet horror circles (a giant, incredibly lanky Humanoid Abomination with an air raid siren for a head) that is commonly mistaken and mislabeled as an SCP, so the existence of the entry is very much made as a "Ha, gotcha!" joke.
• Fine Structure: On Digital Extremities is about a group of scientists developing technology that can transmit information faster than light. As they attempt their first test of this technology, they find that instead of receiving the other testing groups message as expected, it gets cancelled out and they recieve a mysterious signal that seems to originate from nowhere in particular. For the next few years, they attempt to decode this signal and understand what it's trying to say, until one scientist finally figures it out: they have to buy a more expensive broadband package.
• The Cinema Snob review of Superman IV: The Quest for Peace ends with one.
  Snob: But, you know, the movie serves its purpose in letting people debate which is the better Superman film: Superman IV or Man of Steel. And Man of Steel fans can say "Only an idiot would think 'Superman IV' is the better movie!", and Superman IV defenders can always respond with "Yeah, well, at least 'Superman IV' is canon." (shit eating grin)
• "The Moral Of The Story" is a blog post by Scott Alexander consisting entirely of these.
• Word of God from Team Four Star is that the entire first season of Dragon Ball Z Abridged was a setup so they could end the season with the revelation that Vegeta is now being haunted by the ghost of Nappa, Vegeta's annoying henchman that he killed in a fit of rage during the previous episode. More to the point, to have Ghost Nappa sing a parody of the original Ghostbusters theme song.
• 4chan's greentexts are well suited to this sort of joke:
  • One convoluted anecdote concerns Chinese twins named Ving and Ling (never mind that Ving isn't a real Chinese name). The twins go to the town hall so Ving can change his name to Lee ("like Bruce Lee"), but Ving hesitates at the last minute because he doesn't want to betray his family tradition. Just as Ling is pulling out some money to pay the cancellation fee for Ving's paperwork, their dad appears and encourages Ving to go through with the decision: "Don't stop. Be Lee, Ving. Hold on to that fee, Ling."
  • A considerably raunchier greentext is about a young tourist in Freestate Amsterdam losing his virginity to a Swedish New-Age Retro Hippie named Sky. While the narrator is tonguing Sky's ass in a nightclub bathroom, a burly bouncer (also Scandinavian) interrupts them, then starts performing the same sex act on Sky and declares: "Sky's rim belongs to the Nords."
• AC-bu's short Anzenunten no Shiori^note 安全運転のしおり, Guide to Safe Driving does this in Japanese. It's all about a humble salaryman trying to drive to work, only to run a red light and get chased down by the police. Eventually, the chase gets so bad the cars end up somewhere near a mountain road with a lot of steep curves; the police and salaryman lose control of their vehicles and drive over the edge, but before they can die in the ensuing explosion, a mysterious cop on a motorcycle catches them all and carries them to safety. The cop removes their helmet, revealing she was a woman the whole time. Noting her careful driving saved their lives, she promptly introduces herself as ...Shiori. That's right, Shiori's safe driving^note Anzenunten no Shiori kept them alive.
• During the 2016 presidential election in The United States, a convoluted pun◊ originated on Facebook about the candidates trying to determine the winner by racing around the White House. Hillary Rodham Clinton wins in "just under ten minutes" and declares: "That must be some kind of record!" Barack Obama corrects her: "Bush did 9:11" (for those not in the know, that phrase is a meme riffing on conspiracy theories that the 9/11 attacks were an inside job by the Bush administration).
• On Reddit, /r/jokes has given us a few, including an anecdote of Luke's training with Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back, and a fairy tale about Horny Vikings, selkies, and The Fair Folk.
• This◊ story is ostensibly about the poster's bratty cousin, but ends with the reader getting Rick Rolled.
• This 93-part Twitter thread is ostensibly about a cancelled Tomb Raider game and its...unique...developer, who somehow managed to predict pretty much the entirety of 2020. It ends with Lara locked underground, with nothing but depressing news from the outside world to read through on her phone. In other words, she's "tombscrolling".
• This 100-part Twitter thread is about the history of a monastery and the floral trade in Turin. A little over half-way through hits you with the "Only you can prevent Florist Friars" punchline before pivoting into another story culminating in "Kicks are for Trids", a rare double.
• The BagelBoy video, serious buisness about a skeleton trying to get a job via his skill of managing to conjure up a banana out of nowhere, only to be told the company he's applying for is a factory making lightbulbs. The rest of the video is a somewhat sombore monologue from the skeleton lamenting he spent all his life on such a skill, pushing away friends and family, and screwed it up at the last minute, rendering his acomplishment meaningless. He notes he spiralled into a mental breakdown...one could say, he had gone bananas^note cue Lame Pun Reaction via a giant exploding banana. Yeah. It's one of those videos.
• In 2021, Jacksfilms held a 48 Hour Film Festival, where his fans were given 48 hours to make a short video which had to contain the line "That's a spicy meat-a-ball-a!" One fan's entry starred a man playing a midi keyboard at a bowling alley, who throws a tantrum after he gets a gutter ball. The punchline? "Now that's a spicy midi bowler!"
• A common joke by Brazilians in comment threads is making long posts that are unrelated to the topic solely to end with the sentence "comi o cu de quem tá lendo". Translation: "I fucked the ass of whoever is reading this".
• Homestar Runner: Apparently invoked in the Strong Bad Email "pet show", where Strong Bad ends the email on a strained pun to distract the audience from the fact he and The Cheat didn't win at the Cat Mess Inbredtational Pet Show.
  Strong Bad: Don't worry, we're currently appealing the decision of the judges. We're also currently a-peeling... POTATOES!
  (Strong Bad jumps into a pile of potatoes, which The Cheat is peeling while still in his pet show regalia.)
  Strong Bad: (whispering to The Cheat) Hey, The Cheat. Do you think we successfully glossed over the fact we lost the competition?
  The Cheat: (affirmative The Cheat noises)
  Strong Bad: Man, is there anything potatoes can't do?
• One of Egoraptor's earlier Newgrounds shorts is "Mr. Literal", about the titular character having trouble understanding turns-of-phrase, which escalates in a confrontation with his boss to the point of accidentally tearing his boss' arm off. After a moment of horrified realization, Mr. Literal then says, "Let's give him a hand!"
• From Tumblr:
  • This post starts with safety tips for hikers who encounter a bear, but ends with the lyrics to "Teenagers" by My Chemical Romance.
  • A couple is walking in St. Petersburg Square on Christmas Eve …^note This has the same punchline as the Viking joke from the Comedy folder.

Western Animation

• The The Amazing World of Gumball episode "The Catfish" is about Gumball (cat) and Darwin (fish) making up a person online to be their grandpa Louie's friend. Most of it leads up to the pun in the episode title.
  Louie: Do you know what a cat and a fish pretending to be someone else online is called?
  Gumball: Cat... fishing?
  Louie: No! It's called... wait. Actually, yes, that is what it's called.
• Family Guy: In "Wild Wild West", Lois and a few of her friends decide to nominate the town's librarian to be a candidate in the mayoral race. When Lois asks for her name, she replies that it's Elle Hitler ("No relation"), so they all raise their hands and say "Hi, Elle Hitler!".^note For added irony, the people saying it are all ethnic or sexual minorities; Lois, Mort, Principal Shepherd (all Jews), Donna (a black woman), Bruce (a gay man), and Ida (a trans woman).
• The Powerpuff Girls (1998): Towards the conclusion of "Meat The Beat-Alls" (a parallel to the Beatles filled with Beatles references), Judy of the Townsville Zoo recruits one of her chimpanzees to defeat Mojo Jojo. She notes that the chimp was going to learn to play piano, but—as she notes—"Someday monkey won't play piano song, play piano song." ^note Refers to the line in the song "Michelle" which in French was "son le mots qui von tres bien ensemble, tres bien ensemble."
• Rocky and Bullwinkle:
  • Mister Peabody in the Peabody's Improbable History sketches would end on him making a summation of the historical goings on in a Pun. Lampshaded on one occasion when he makes the awful pun in the middle of the segment:
    Sherman: You should've saved that one for the ending, Mr. Peabody.
    Mr. Peabody: Oh I have one that's worse than that.
  • The alternate titles for the segments of the main cartoon were, quite often, Puns as well. In many cases, it seems strongly likely that plot developments were thrown in specifically so they could work the puns in as titles.
  • The Aesop and Son segments would end with Aesop giving the moral of the story, followed by Aesop Jr. giving an alternate "moral" as a pun.
    Jr.: Dad, I think the lesson here is "People in grass houses shouldn't throw bones."
    Aesop: Takes after his mother, he does.
  • The "Fractured Fairy Tales" segments were likewise overly long gags that were usually twists on familiar fairy tales, setting up for an excruciatingly bad pun at the end.
• The Simpsons: The episode "Apocalypse Cow" has Bart befriending a cow that he names Lou. At the end, after they part ways, Bart remarks that "For once in my life, I had a cow, man."
• The South Park episode "More Crap" turns out to be this. The reason why Bono tries so hard at everything is because of a major case of envy. He is literally made out of feces — according to his father, "He will always be my Number Two." The rest of the joke is finding ways to say that Bono is the world's biggest shit.
• SpongeBob SquarePants: In "Wet Painters", SpongeBob and Patrick are hired by Mr. Krabs to paint his house, warning them that the paint they're using is incredibly permanent and promising traumatic amputation of their backsides if they stain any of his valuables with it.^note The paint, not their backsides. After a series of mishaps and close calls, the duo manage to paint the entire house—but they get a tiny, microscopic speck on Mr. Krabs' first dollar earned. Their panicked attempts to remove the speck only make the stain worse until it covers the entire bill, and Mr. Krabs invariably discovers the act. When he does, he grabs the dollar off the wall and...licks it clean; apparently, he was only joking about the permanence to mess with the two, and the paint actually easily comes off with saliva. The little prank leaves Spongebob and Patrick unimpressed, and they take their leave, but Krabs is so amused by his own joke that he breaks into hysterics—and in the process sends his laughter-induced spittle all over the walls, which subsequently dissolves the paint and leaves him right back where he started. Seeing the unfortunate results of his laughter session, Old Man Krabs has but this to say:
  Mr. Krabs: Aww, crud! I really gotta learn to say it, not spray it.
• The Teen Titans Go! episode "The Art of Ninjitsu" revolves around the team trying to capture the "Golden McGuffin", an indeterminate object that is important to Robin, because... reasons. At the end, they find out that the McGuffin they were questing for is an egg, bacon and English muffin sandwich. Cyborg drops the by-now-mandatory pun:
  Cyborg: You mean we did all this for an Egg McGuffin?

Real Life

• In France, the concept of "Fable-express" was popular at some point and consisted of making poetry or fables for the sole purpose of ending with a punny moral.
• A man in China was faced with rescuing his girlfriend Rong or his ex-girlfriend Jun after they both jumped into a river. He chose Rong.
• After taking LSD, a man in Oregon attacked a car, claiming he was an Elf and the car was the Dark Lord Morgoth. He was a high elf.

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