Flintstone Theming is when a single pervasive concept that is basic to the show is used repeatedly for as many jokes as it can possibly yield, especially with
character names. Some shows shoot for the moon and try to make a pun out of
everything.
World Building is sometimes hard. Coming up with an
endless string of bad puns based on the concept of your show, on the other hand, is usually pretty easy. At least at first. It gets progressively harder to come up with decent, original puns the longer and longer your show is on the air and the more puns you’ve already used up.
Compare
Hold Your Hippogriffs. See also
Mister Sandman Sequence, which is similar - only abusing
Popular History instead of the English language.
Examples:
Anime and Manga
- Shinryaku! Ika Musume's main character constantly spouts aquatic puns like "What the gill!" or "Let's get kraken! (cracking)" in the English dub.
Comic Books
Literature
- In Rudolph The Nasally-Empowered Reindeer, a story in James Finn Garner's Politically Correct Holiday Stories, some older reindeer scold Rudolph for "rocking the kayak." (Because they're in the Arctic.)
- In How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, Who-ville does this with the word "who". For example, their Christmas feasts involve "Who-pudding" and "Who-roast-beast".
- There's a reason Harry Potter is the Trope Namer for Hold Your Hippogriffs.
Live-Action TV
Radio
- Subverted in one episode of I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again: at the beginning of a sea-based sketch, John Cleese irritatedly recites all the fish puns he can think of right at the start, to get them out of the way. "And that concludes the fish jokes. Thank cod!"
- Kip Addotta's "Wet Dream"
also goes for the fish puns; it often gets played on the Doctor Demento show.
Video Games
- The Fallout series manages to pull double duty on this. Everything from before the war is either Atomic- this, Nuka-that or some kind of 50s pop culture reference; while about half of anything more recent is a Mad Max reference.
- Plants Vs Zombies uses as many plant puns as it possibly can. It starts with the relatively mild "Pea Shooter" and goes on from there.
Web Comics
Western Animation
- The Flintstones is the Trope Namer, for reasons that should be obvious to anyone who has ever seen an episode. Between the Stone Age equivalents of modern technology and the rock-and-stone puns tossed out at a rate of four or five per minute, these jokes are basically the only thing that make the show not The Honeymooners.
- An episode of Robot Chicken lampshaded the fact that the rock-based puns sometimes just didn’t work well.
- And, of course, The Jetsons did the same with "futuristic" and/or planetary themed puns.
- Futurama either parodies this or just uses it brilliantly by twisting the Planet of Hats concept into providing a different one of these almost every episode (using up every possible joke about shellfish along the way).
- SpongeBob SquarePants oscillates randomly between "everything is replaced with its loose underwater equivalent" and completely ignoring its setting, depending on whatever makes the joke at hand work.
- The Abra-Catastrophe Fairly OddParents special landed Timmy Turner in a world where the human race had been replaced by sentient apes. The primate-related puns flowed like water.
- Timmy then lampshades this by expressing his desire to "wish for a world without puns".
- Fish Police, a cop show set underwater, where all the characters were fish, seemed to exist solely to make loads and loads of fish-related puns.
- The characters in Miss Spider's Sunny Patch Friends replaced the –body suffix with –buggy (anybuggy, somebuggy, busybuggy, and so on).
- The Geronimo Stilton series lives and breathes puns related to rodents and cheese.
- My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic has this in spades. The main cast is called the mane cast by fans, there are towns and cities such as Canterlot, Manehattan, Appleloosa (like the breed Appaloosa), they say things like "everypony" and "nopony"... Naturally, Fan Nicknames continue the trend (Stalliongrad, Trottingham, San Franciscolt, etc.)
- Trottingham eventually became canon as the birthplace of Pipsqeak, one of the series' minor characters.
- Birdz, with an entirely avian (except one) cast, was up to its beak in bird puns. These usually manifested themselves in the names of celebrities (e.g. "Whippoorwill Smith"), but also in the setting of Birdland and the occasional "anybird".
- Monster High uses "ghoul" as a substitute for everything possible (though most usually "girl").
