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alt title(s): Incredibly Lazy Pun "Not a joke, but an incredible simulation!"
"Can you spot the pun? It's incredibly, unbelievably subtle."
The writers put in a joke (almost always a pun), then omit the punch line. Some percentage of the audience will "get" the joke, but the rest will know it was there and be going, "What? Why didn't you say it?" There can be several reasons.
- It's naughty/ecchi and not appropriate for this timeslot, in which case this serves the same purpose as a Last Second Word Swap.
- It's a really bad pun and is only remotely funny when realized later; using it in story would grind everything to a halt.
- Telling the punch line would keep our lawyers busy for months, so we'll just leave a blank here and let you do the copyright infringement.
- The writer thinks they're being clever. Sometimes they even are.
Figuring these out can sometimes be a form of Fridge Brilliance known as a Swiss Moment.
Formerly known as Incredibly Lazy Pun, but the name was so often confused with "A pun that's just really bad, like ' Collective Groan' bad or 'the writers were lazy and chose the easiest/most obvious pun' bad, etc.", that the page Incredibly Lame Pun was set up as a Henway to help fix this.
Also, as this page is about puns that are intentionally obscured in-work, it is one of the few times when it is good form to explain the joke.
Examples:
open/close all folders
Anime and Manga
- The Geneon dub of Lupin III once had Jigen describe a house-fly that turned out to be a listening device as "a flying pun".
- In Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, Nanoha is pursuing Jewel Seeds, which grant wishes. One such Jewel Seed had possessed a tree that was near a couple's confession of love, and it responded by turning into a massive maurdering monster, trapping them inside itself and trying to consume everything. The pun comes when you realise what the guy must have been wishing for: wood.
- A less dirty way of interpreting this was that they pined for each other. (This pun actually works in Japanese, too.)
- Because we're too old for "sitting in a tree" here.
- During one of Adam Warren's Dirty Pair stories, a villain introduces a clone of "good girl" Yuri into the convention the girls are hosting, to shake things up. We first hear about "clone-Yuri's" antics from one of the con-goers (much to real Yuri's distress). Then we cut to Clone Yuri's room and we can clearly see (though the words are never spoken) that she has been literally "screwed, blued, and tattooed".
- The main character of One Piece is named Monkey D. Luffy, and his first appearance in the anime was breaking out of a small barrel (though not in the manga, as this wasn't until the second chapter and we saw how he got in there first). Perhaps the implication is that the show will be more fun than a barrel of monkeys.
- Cowboy Bebop - Spike goes out with a bang.
- Most crossover Fan Art of characters cosplaying as other characters with the same seiyuu for both characters is never said out loud unless someone actually asks. Like all those Shana, Louise, Nagi and Taiga Fan Art.
Stand Up Comedy
- David Letterman did something along these lines when he gave a list of the top ten Bill Clinton jokes. He never actually got to the punchline, he just would trail off and look at the audience, who could figure it out for themselves and were hysterical by that point.
- A somewhat well-known joke concerns a pair of hikers who die while rock-climbing. As their souls ascend to heaven, they see a pair of eagles and exclaim, "Ah, eagles!" The eagles, to be polite, say nothing.
- "Ah, souls!" (Say it out loud. Works best with a British accent.)
- Conan O'Brien in Late Night, doing one of the 'cat is to kitten, what dog is to puppy' routines: "The New Orleans Hooker (long pause) had sex with several miners. Michael Jackson (an even longer pause, with audience already chuckling) famous in the 80's! What did you think I was going to say?"
Comic Books
- Two issues of James Robinson's Firearm involved the title character entering a virtual world based on Glasgow, mostly as a gift to Glaswegian artist Gary Erskine. In one panel, Erskine drew a figure that resembled Alex from A Clockwork Orange outside an underground station. The local nickname for Glasgow's underground railway is "the clockwork orange".
- In Watchmen, Rorschach breaks Nite-Owl's lock to get into his apartment. It gets replaced. Then he does it again. It gets replaced. Then the police break in. The lock holds but the door is destroyed. The pun? The lock company was called Gordian Knot Lock Company.
- In Watchmen, Rorschach's foe in prison is short, and his two henchmen are, respectively, nasty and brutish. All three of them perceive Rorschach's comments ("small world", "fat chance", etc.) as being snide remarks about them. ...Hrm...possibly true. Must look into later.
- Ultimate Spider-Man updates Peter Parker's status quo; he still works for the Daily Bugle in this version, but he helps manage their internet site instead of taking pictures. That's right, Spider-Man's a webmaster.
- The second issue of the Great Ten series is called The Tao of Archery. It involves Celestial Archer, whose real name is Xu Tao.
Commercials
- Anyone remember the Charmin toilet paper commercials with the cartoon bears? Left entirely unsaid is they're all about bears shitting in the woods.
- Similarly, there's an advert currently airing in the UK which has an angry bear in the middle of a cubicle farm, who turns back into a flustered office worker when given a painkiller. Implying, of course, that she's acting like a bear with a sore head.
- Um, what? That's not a phrase used in (at least most) of the US.
- Boost Mobile has a commercial with Danica Patrick racing and going into the pit where her pit crew are a bunch of men dressed in outfits similar to the Dallas cowboy cheerleaders, one even has tan lines for a bikini. So it features drag racing.
- The chorus of the classic "Fight! Kikkoman
 " song/commercial for Kikkoman soy sauce:
Show me
Show you
Kikkoman, kikkoman
"Show you" can also be interpreted as shouyu, the Japanese word for soy sauce.
Fan Fic
- In Three Messengers, one of the fortune-tellers is Old Woman Riley - in Japanese, this would be Riley-obaba. The author is a fan of The Who.
Film
Literature
- In The Wee Free Men, a talking toad is introduced as a guide for Tiffany Aching. Although it was explained that said toad's yellow colour was caused by his being unwell, nobody ever actually told her to "follow the yellow sick toad". As the author said:
Terry Pratchett: I just happened to note a toad had a skin which had had unfortunately gone a bit yellow because it had been ill. Far be it from me to make a pun. You did that.
- This was played as a straight Pun in Moving Pictures, where a man in half a lion suit says "I don't know what it's called, but we're doing one about going to see a wizard. Something about following a yellow sick toad."
- Similarly, in Jingo!, when Carrot is investigating an attempted political killing with strong similarities to the Kennedy assassination, he interviews a gnoll. In addition to being an informant, the creature has plants growing on it. That's two possible routes to the phrase "grassy gnoll", but it never happens.
- The worst offender has got to be Soul Music. There's a scene where the main character, Imp Y Celyn, explains his name- imp being a term for new growth at the end of a stalk, and celyn being a member of the holly family. The entire book is full of music puns like that, some more subtle than others. Of course this is made even more obvious when he starts going by the name Buddy.
- Later on in the book, the Dean of UU spends several scenes constructing an elaborate coat. Later, Death, knowing that some things have to look right, borrows it before going very quickly to an important place. When he gets there, he kills The Music. None of this is ever spelled out.
- The Dean also spends a lot of time riveting trousers out of denim. The Archchancellor complains, and the Dean replies that soon everyone will be wearing them, and they certainly won't be called Archchancellors.
- One of the bands manages to acquire a leopard, which is a bit hard of hearing.
- Don't forget Death riding to the rescue on a motorcycle, which turns ghostly as parts break off...meaning that by the end, he's hitting the highway like a battering ram on a silver-black phantom bike. (Like a Bat out of Hell...)
- Plus, the motorcycle was built in the basement, so Death gets it out of the building via the ceiling ... through the ground above◊.
- In Witches Abroad, there's a couple of puns where the first two witches give an outright pun or Allusion but Nanny Ogg delivers the stealth pun.
- The three of them are deliberating on the idea of a transport system built on broomsticks. Their ideas for names are puns on well know real world airlines but Nanny Ogg gets cut off before she says hers. However, note she is looking at Magrat and being rather coquettish. Consider Magrat's role in The Hecate Sisters trio. Virgin.
- In a later scene, while stuck in a Wizard of Oz parody, Magrat and Granny have a falling out. As they walk along the obligatory yellow brick road, Magrat says "some people" need a little more heart, Granny Weatherwax says "some people" need a lot more brain, and Nanny Ogg, both literally and figuratively stuck between the two, thinks to herself that she needs a drink. i.e., Dutch Courage
- There's also a recurrence of Granny trying to tell a joke about an alligator sandwich ("...and make it snappy!"), but she keeps blowing the punchline ("...and do it fast!").
- In Pyramids, a voting system involving each elector placing round beads into a jar is described as giving rise to a popular saying about politics. Presumably that it's a load of balls.
- I always thought that was a reference to being blackballed.
- In Going Postal,
John Galt Captain Flint Reacher Gilt dresses up as a pirate and has a parrot sitting on his shoulder that continually shouts "twelve and a half percent!" Twelve and a half is 100 divided by 8, or, in other words, one Piece of Eight, which is the traditional coinage that all pirates are after.
- The Last Hero includes some pages that are excerpts of fictional documents. One of these is a list of "Varieties of the Swamp Dragon". One of the listed varieties is the "Nothingfjord Blue", which is given this description: "Wonderful scales, but a tendency to homesickness". In other words, it's pining for the fjords.
- In Night Watch, Dr Lawn briefly refers to "the founder of my profession, the philosopher Scepturn". Since this is obviously the Disc version of Hippocrates, the highly cynical Lawn has presumably taken the Sceptic Oath.
- The Guild of
SeamstrWHORESLadies of Negotiable Affection (pre-legalization and renomination) employed Dotsie and Sadie, known as the Agony Aunts since that's what they inflict on badly behaving customers. Now say their names the other way round.
- ...Atagony (a bothersome made-up word based on playing around with the word "atagonist")? Some play on a form of the word "sadism"? Would help if you had at least said whether you meant their individual names, multiple-word collective name, or both.
- I think you might have overthought this one mate. In British English, an Agony Aunt is an advice columnist. This is a pretty straight joke. Nice thought though.
- I might be overthinking this one myself, but I got Swiss Momented on the train home from work by a pun in Discworld/Thud! Mr. Shine is a troll made of diamond, making him the troll king by their ancient mythology, spoilered for convenience. I'd be surprised if Pterry meant this one, but would that make him King Diamond?
- One of the creatures in The Phantom Tollbooth is the Everpresent Wordsnatcher, a bird who comes from a place named Context and likes to take words from other people's mouths and twist them. He comes this close to explaining the pun:
"I'm from a land very far away called Context. But it's such a nasty place I try to spend all my time out of it."
- The book is really entirely made up of these puns.
- In The Rock Rats by Ben Bova:
Fuchs: So, Mr. Ripley, will your crew be able to assemble the latest additions on schedule?
Mr. Ripley: Believe it or not, they will.
- In Gödel, Escher, Bach, the dialogue "Aria with Diverse Variations" (named after a piece by J. S. Bach more commonly known as the Goldberg Variations) mostly concerns the Goldbach Conjecture and variations on it. Near the end of the dialogue, Achilles suddenly offers the Tortoise the gift of a "very gold Asian box." This pun doesn't get to sink in until after the true ending of the dialogue: a fake ending in which a cop arrives and Achilles turns the Tortoise in for the reported theft of a Very Asian Gold Box.
- In The Dresden Files, there's a supporting character named Virginia, who is a werewolf. No one mentions that they are afraid of Virginia Wolf.
- Also in The Dresden Files, Harry is asked to guess the name of the wizard who is the newest member of the Senior Council. His guess is "Klaus the Toymaker." It is implied that Harry is not joking, but he's wrong.
- In Summer Knight, we meet a very small fairy that looks to be nothing more than a spark of light. Her name? Elidee. Say it aloud.
- In the classic Sherlock Holmes story "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle", Holmes and Watson find a priceless gem inside a stolen Christmas goose, and figuring out how it got there takes them all over London. Somehow, Conan Doyle managed to resist having Watson complain about a wild goose chase.
- Combined with a Shout Out in Randall Garrett's Too Many Magicians, in which a character named Tia Einzig learns that her uncle Napoleon has escaped to the Isle of Man. Since "Einzig" is German for "solo", this would make him Napoleon Solo, the UNCLE from Man. (For extra Shout Out points, she learns this from her uncle's friend Colin McDavid; Napoleon's partner, of course, is played by David McCallum.)
- The last of Patricia C Wrede's Enchanted Forest Chronicles features a character called Daystar. Guess how he relates to the previous main characters.
- In the Ciaphas Cain (Hero of the Imperium!) novel Duty Calls, the pilot of Amberley's ship is named Pontius. Also one of the major players in the novel are soldiers from an all-female religious order based in the planet's region of Gavaronne. The fact that they are literally the Nuns of Gavaronne is never explicitly made.
- In The Traitor's Hand, there is a brief mention of an animal called the nauga, whose hide is particularly useful for "certain hard-wearing applications."
- A Civil Campaign introduces Armsman Roic, who battles against the off-planet law enforcement coming to take away Dr. Borgos. It could be said that the Armsman was acting he-Roic-ally. (This only works if you pronounce his name that way; reportedly the author Herself pronounces it differently, thus didn't see the pun coming.)
- Thursday Next has a ton of these. The best is probably when Thurs has to remove Hamlet from his play, while in the A-plot, recurring villian Yorick is running around. You do the math.
- In one Star Trek New Frontier book (all written by Pungeon Master Peter David), a beast is described as cyclopean, with a large horn, wings, and purple fur, hunting crew members for food. Lampshaded later as one of the stalked crew members says, "It sure looked strange to me." "He was a one-eyed, one-horned, flying purple people eater // Sure looked strange to me"
- Although almost certainly not deliberate, The scene with Count Ugolino and Archbishop Ruggieri in Dante's Divine Comedy has one of these. Ugolino only stops gnawing on Ruggieri's head long enough to tell Dante about the horrible way Ruggieri killed him, in effect giving the Archbishop a good chewing out.
- In Harry Potter, Vernon Durseley works at Grunning Drills - or, in other words, his job is very boring.
Live Action TV
- The cobbler episode of Good Eats featured Alton trying to get into a historic food society after the death of one of the lifetime members, Mr. Yorrick. Cue the Shakespeare:
Alton: Alas! Poor Yorrick!
Mr Avery: You knew him?
Alton: Not too well.
- The guys behind Monty Python's Flying Circus (and all other Monty Python media) are famous for avoiding punchlines in almost everything they've done. Their reason was that they would see great skits, but would usually end up disappointed by the weak punchline. They resolved to end their sketches before the punchline, unless they wanted it to be ironic.
- The Father Ted episode "Chirpy Burpy Cheap Sheep" is about a sheep who is being driven neurotic. There's a concealed pun implicit in this concept (and revealed in The Other Wiki's relevant episode entry) but it is something of a subversion since neither the pun nor the punchline are actually spoken.
- The same Nantucket limerick shows up in the pilot of Babylon 5. Delenn has heard it, and thinks it's a typical example of Earth poetry....
- And again in this Daily Show/Colbert Report bit, as a shorter alternative to an epic poem.
- A variant appears in the Star Trek The Next Generation episode "The Naked Now". As the Enterprise crew succumb to an inebriation-inducing virus, Data reports picking up numerous disturbances on internal sensors, including a crewman singing a limerick:
Data: There once was a woman from Venus, whose body was shaped like a—
Picard: Security!
- And speaking of TNG, there's the emotionless android Data and his more human brother Lore. This borders on Fridge Brilliance.
- One from the Pushing Daisies episode 'Dummy':
Chuck: But where are the real dummies?
Emerson starts sniggering
Narrator: Before Emerson Cod could reply with a clever, if slightly insulting remark, something moving caught his eye.
- The Colbert Report has Gorlock, a Signs-esque alien who advises Stephen on various topics. He was first introduced as Stephen's financial advisor and an excuse to make Scientology jokes, but we later find out that he's also Stephen's attorney. Making him... A legal alien.
- Was there ever a mention of him taking a sick day?
- In Veronica Mars, the late Lilly Kane called her younger brother Duncan by the nickname "Donut". One (admittedly cute) fanfic posited that it was because he wanted to be a cop as a kid. Someone clearly missed the pun.
- One episode of The Muppet Show opened with the Bug Band, a group of four insects, singing She Loves You. Backstage after the song, Kermit says that the group needs a name and instead of the obvious suggestion they come up with The Who and The Grateful Dead.
- The BBC's series Merlin features King Uther. He keeps a dragon penned up in the dungeon.
- In Star Trek The Original Series, Kirk claims to be from the island of Noman at one point
- A famous example from Saturday Night Live's Celebrity Jeopardy sketches:
Sean Connery: "What's the difference between your mother and a mallard with a cold? I forget the rest but your mother's a whore."
- Presumably, one is a sick duck, and the other sucks dick.
- In Reaper, the Devil gives Sam his phone number. We never see it, but Sam's reaction to the area code makes it pretty obvious it's 666.
- On Mock The Week, Milton Jones comments that farmers have recently started using heroin but finding the evidence has been difficult. It's like finding a needle in a haystack.
- In this Scrubs episode an imaginary patient has a kitten in his mouth. Probably he misunderstood the concept of eating pussy.
- Obligatory Buffy The Vampire Slayer example: For several episodes of Season 4, Oz wore a sheepskin jacket. As he's a werewolf, you know what that makes him...
- Another Buffy example : in the episode Tabula Rasa, Spike is being pursued by a demon he owes money to. The demon has the head of a shark. Which makes him... a loan shark.
- Stargate SG 1 had the following exchange:
Anis: "You may call me Anis. It means 'Noble Strength'"
Daniel: "I am Daniel It means 'God is my judge'"
Jack: "I'm Jack. It means....what's in the box?"
'it means jack' is colloquial for 'it means nothing'
Jack's Daniel's best friend... If you don't get it, you need to stop drinking it...
- In The Sopranos, Phil's men is hiding in Vito's motel room, where they ambush and plan to kill him due to the revelation that he's gay. Phil himself is hiding in a closet, and once Vito has been subdued, Phil reveals himself to Vito by coming out of the closet.
- On Top Gear, there is a joke award for the biggest presenter error called the Golden Cock award (a small figurine of a rooster). In the 2009 Top Gear Awards, the award was given to their "tame racing driver," The Stig, who refused to give it back and got quite violent when Richard Hammond tried to take it away from him. So you could say The Stig really likes the cock.
- Cheers episode "Little Carla, Happy at Last": Carla finds out she's pregnant by Eddie LeBec. Worse yet, it's twins. She thinks that's bad news but the father disagrees:
Eddie: Twins means we're twice blessed! I can't believe it! This is the happiest night of my life!
Sam: You know, I had twins once. It was the happiest night of my life too.
- An episode of Malcolm In The Middle had Dewey being menaced by a girl in his class. Reese offers to help him come up with some barbs to throw at her, and suggests finding something that rhymes with her name. Dewey says she's "Regina Tucker," and Reese says that isn't much to work with, but he's sure they'll think of something.
- The How I Met Your Mother episode Showdown has the following, in regards to Barney competing on The Price Is Right:
"When I win all the prizes, the only thing you guys are getting is Rice-A-Roni and Turtle Wax."
- Fairly funny in and of itself, but when you consider the Weird Al song "I Lost On Jeopardy," in which two of the prizes he didn't win were a case of Turtle Wax and a year's supply of Rice-A-Roni, it's even funnier. One run-on sentence later, you are fully up to speed.
Music
- Pick a song by Relient K. Any song, really. It will contain at least one of these, if not an Incredibly Lame Pun in the title.
- In the song "Necessity" from Finian's Rainbow, the lines quoted below provoke the shouted question "Do you mean he's a —?", which is answered in the affirmative (the implied statement being that Necessity is a bastard):
Oh, hell is the father of gin,
And Cupid's the father of love.
Old Satan's the father of sin,
But no one knows the father of
Necessity.
- It also seems to be a stealth pun on the saying "Necessity is the mother of invention."
- From a Cunninlynguists song: "kill an unborn baby and you still couldn't defeat us."
- Girl Anachronism by The Dresden Dolls: about a girl who blames her constant sickness on having been born too soon by C-section. Including the line "You can tell (...) that I'm not right now at all."
- A couple in Don McLean's "American Pie". Did Lenin or Lennon read a book on Marx? And "It landed foul on the grass" isn't refering to the green stuff on your front lawn.
- There's so many in that song it deserves its own page really.
- Singer/drummer Robert Wyatt of Soft Machine left after four and a half albums to form another band called Matching Mole, after the French words for soft machine, machine molle.
News
Newspaper Comics
- In The Wizard Of Id a visitor to the untrustworthy King's castle notices that the King's flag consists of a pair of black X's on a white background. The visitor asks for the name of this emblem. The king moves on to another pun before it mentioned the king is represented by Double Crosses.
- This Mallard Fillmore strip. The punchline sounds almost like a parody of his usual Strawman Political rants; eventually someone figured out it's a Stealth Pun. (Because NASCAR fans are "race-ists".) Go ahead and groan; everybody groans at Mallard Fillmore, for one reason or another.
- A recent (late 2009) Housebroken strip had DJ Dog mentioning his plans to expand his empire. His plans include a line of handbags called DJ Doggie Bags, a soft drink called DJ Doggie Dew, and a fashion and lifestyle magazine called DJ Doggie...Fashion Magazine. Maya says she can't think of a better name for the last one without them getting cancelled.
- Fox Trot sometimes has the characters making references to Bill O'Reilly or Sean Hannity being on TV - which of course means that the Fox family is watching Fox News.
- Man, does Scott Adams love this.
Radio
- From The Very World Of Milton Jones: ...and when we were naughty at school, we used to be sent to this man with no arms and no legs and no body. He was the Head. And if he wasn't in, we used to be sent to this other man with no arms and no legs and no body and a cowboy hat. He was Mr Roberts. (The correct punchline is, of course, "the deputy head".)
Theme Parks
- Kennywood in Pittsburgh has an inverting pendulum ride called the Aero 360. It's shaped like... um, the Kennywood logo◊.
Toys
Video Games
Web Animation
- One of the guests at Donkey's funeral in Weebl And Bob is a giant ape. Chris identifies him as Donkey's father ("He doesn't like to talk about it."), but the character's name is never mentioned.
Web Comics
- This Irregular Webcomic strip. Also, comparing "hobbit" and "habit" is so common that the author promised to only do it once every 100 strips. Mostly averted, though... The author is abnormally fond of puns. Somehow, he makes it work.
- Not to mention this strip. ( "I'll get you, store of hay! And your little togs, too!") In which he mentions this very article.
- Another example: in this strip, Lambert's hobbit-pun is ruined by a (rather ominous, but that's not the point) cough.
- In this episode of Striptease, in a flashback to high school, Max and Em are squirted with red paint by another student, who is then caught by the teacher... red-handed.
- In this episode of Adventures in ASCII (a strip where the characters are letters and other printables), Miss B reacts with a stony silence upon learning that Bold H is taking the guest Miss Delta (she's from @hens) down the river to see the estuary.
Miss B: ...
Bold H: What?
Miss B: I didn't say anything.
Bold H: It was the way you didn't say it.
- Here's another one from the same comic about an injured number. Apparently a three falling in a forest does indeed make a sound.
- This xkcd comic doubles the stakes. It's based on another joke with an Incredibly Lame Pun chline.
- Tally HO, a somewhat obscure webcomic, does the Stealth Pun here with a common cry of Windows supporters and creators alike. "It's not a bug, It's a feature." This isn't original; it's an old geek joke.
- You actually named it "Variety"?
- The guy in white is Bobby, the incarnation of Life.
- Nerf Now with a classic riddle and a..."modern classic" Dracula. "What is a man?"
- Chopping Block Here.
- This Precocious strip, which was actually explained by its creator:
"Et Tu, Brute?" - Famous line from Julius Caesar.
The Et family really should know better than to go out in pairs.
- This Nukees. "Duck Orations" would be "Quacks."
- In this Order Of The Stick strip: Fleeing the burning city, Elan stops to break into a music shop and steals a lute. The setup is palpable, but the inevitable pun goes unsaid.
- In Triangle and Robert, one of the plotlines involves Triangle fighting things to recover a series of "Dragon Circles," which are lettered A, B, C, etc. When he gets to the 25th one, Dragon Circle Y, he discovers that's the end of them, there are only 25. "Somehow, avoiding the pun makes it even worse."
- In The Inexplicable Adventures Of Bob, Bob's unseen next door neighbor is named Ray, a reference to the old comedy team, Bob And Ray. Even more obscurely, another unseen neighbor is Mrs. Spitoonelli (a play on "spitoon," of course), with a husband named Harold. It is later mentioned her first name is Maude, referring to the Black Comedy movie Harold And Maude. And in Galatea's French adventure, she rides a Vespa with the name "Princess" on the side.
- In this filler strip of Keychain Of Creation, we're treated to the Orphaned Punchline of a (naughty) joke that ends with "What I really meant is that we'd need cunning translators." See, in Exalted, your translation ability is measured by your score in "Linguistics", so apparently the joke began with her telling the king that she needed "cunning linguists". I'll leave you to figure out the rest.
- Dr Mc Ninja provides you with this image of a train accident to use if your forum discussion gets off topic it has been derailed.
- Also, there's one bit of alt text that imagines Dr. Mc Ninja being followed on a quest by his refrigerator. A subsequent panel gives alt text of the fridge huffing as it tries to keep up. His refrigerator is running.
- Shortpacked! features a character named Leslie Bean, who is, as her name suggests, a lesbian...but the more subtle pun comes from the fact that she joined the main cast around the time Ethan lost his role as Only Sane Man, and now tends to be the voice of reason in Seinfeldian Conversations and hijinks, making her... the straight man.
- This◊ Perry Bible Fellowship strip has one as an added bonus joke: Imagine what the hammer is saying in the last panel.
- VG Cats gives us Super Effective, a side webcomic, giving us breaking news of the death of a legend...Elvis. Note which pokemon is giving us the news.
- And for those of us who have no clue what pokemon is what besides Pikachu?
- Slowpoke.
- For more lulz, see the forum of this comic
- This troper, for whatever reason, cannot see any of the pictures on the website mezzacotta.com, not knowing for sure whether there actually are any. The annotations are...amusing, to say the least.
Web Original
Western Animation
- A lot of the names in Fosters Home For Imaginary Friends are puns, especially when combined with other characters' names. For instance: Blooregard Q. Kazoo, thus Bloo Q. Kazoo kukukachu, Cheese and Louise, and others.
- Cheese is a veritable minefield of these puns, two of which (Bloo Cheese, Mac & Cheese) are spelled out in his introductory episode.
- In Kim Possible, when we are first introduced to Team Go, Ron asks why Mego wears a purple costume. Team leader Hego replies, "He's a shrinker" and drops the subject. He's a shrinking violet (but not a Shrinking Violet, mind you); Warner/DC would not be amused.
- Austin's fur color in The Backyardigans.
- Also in The Backyardigans, in the episode "Mission to Mars", Austin controls a Mars Rover named Rover. This Trouper also realized the joke about this also meaning the car Austin Rover.
- In the The Fairly Oddparents book-jumping episode "Shelf Life":
Wanda: Egad, he turned the Three Musketeers into the three Mouse— (Timmy then swiftly covers her mouth and teleports them out.)
- And later in the same episode:
Cosmo: So he gets into a physics book, what's the worst that could happen? Timmy: He could turn gravity into gravy. He could turn the planets into plants. He could turn Uranus into— Wanda: Oh my God, we have to stop him!
- The segment "Dread and Breakfast" has a cameo by two Shaggy and Scooby-Doo lookalikes. Not-Shaggy refers to Not-Scooby as "Doob", which would probably make "Doob"'s name Doobie.
- Don't forget how Timmy's fairies are usually disguised as goldfish, so Timmy has A Fish Called Wanda
- George Frankly, of Math Net on Square One TV, also visited the island of Noman. (Back when Kate Monday was still his partner, and he was still with the LAPD.) He explained the name as being of Native American origin.
- One episode of Tiny Toon Adventures has a Credits Gag explaining that Plucky Duck was "inadvertently omitted from 'The Name Game.'"
- In fact, Wikipedia warns that using Alice, Dallas, Tucker, Chuck, Buck, Huck, Bart, Art, Mitch, Rich, Richie, Maggie, or Danny will result in "profanity or rude language."
- The Rugrats movie had Charlotte say towards the beginning of the movie, when referring to the soon-to-be-born Dil, "You know what they say - born under Venus, look for a—" which is then interrupted by her cellphone ringing.
- Robot Chicken once had a shot of the Fourth Doctor standing on the first base of a baseball diamond. After waiting a second, the Doctor says "Do ya get it?"
- I thought the joke was the "Senreich-Green University" sign. But when you think about it, that joke make sense.
- The Simpsons did it a couple times with the limerick about the man from Nantucket. For the record, "There once was a man from Nantucket/Whose cock was so long he could suck it/And he said, with a grin/As he wiped off his chin/"If my ear were a cunt I would fuck it!."
- "The" limerick? There's dozens with that starting line.
- Once:
Barney: (doing handsprings) I am the very model of a modern major general!
Homer: That's nothing! (doing cartwheels) There once was a man from Nantucket, who... D'oh! (runs into wall)
- And again:
Homer: You know, I once knew a man from Nantucket.
Bart: And?
Homer: Let's just say the stories about him are greatly exaggerated.
- And again:
Homer: There once was this guy from an island off the coast of Massachusetts... Nantucket, I think it was. Anyway, he had the most unusual personal characteristic, which was, um...
- Another instance not using the man from Nantucket limerick, maybe even being a parody of its usage, comes in an episode where Krusty the Clown is giving Homer an old trampoline of his and talks about dirty limericks ("There once was a man named Enis...").
- So WHO had the most limericks written about them - was it the man named Enis, or the woman from Regina?
- Another from the Simpsons is the traffic guy for Channel Six News, Arnie Pie, who very deliberately avoids the painfully obvious pun on his name; his segment, live from the traffic chopper, is called "Arnie in the Sky."
- Still another: Krusty the Clown once mentioned that he and Bette Midler once owned a horse together, and named it "Krudler." For those who didn't get it, the more appropriate name is revealed in the DVD Commentary of the episode: Misty
- Alternatively, the far less appropriate Busty
- The Simpsons also gives us "Sneed's Feed & Seed (Formerly Chuck's)"
- In the episode Sideshow Bob Roberts, the character playing the role of Deep Throat is Mr. Smithers.
- In The Tick, there is a running gag where several villains are never actually named, but they are very obvious visual puns. So we have an evil boy genius with see-through plastic cranium, but never actually called "Brain Child". Or the man dressed as someone's granny, obsessed with stealing inventions is never called "The mother of invention".
- And neither is his name Necessity?
- Both Brainchild and Mother of Invention were named, with The Tick vs. Brainchild even as an episode title.
- Surprisingly, The Powerpuff Girls does this at one point: despite the series' tendency towards the Incredibly Lame Pun, the Mayor's secretary is referred to only as "Miss Bellum." Given her brain capacity relative to that of the Mayor, it's not hard to guess what her first name is... Sarah.
- They have stated her name at least once. However, it was in fact Sarah.
- Also, Him looks like Satan and dresses like Santa Claus. He also has claws. This is never commented on directly.
- In Futurama, Fry's grandfather is named "Enis". His rank is "Private".
- Batman The Brave And The Bold "Deep Cover for Batman", Batman thinks he may have found an ally in The Scarlet Scarab based on a conversation he heard, but it turns out to just provide misdirection, meaning that the Scarlet Scarab was a Red Herring.
- In the Justice League episode "The Terror Beyond", Hawkgirl taunts Icthultu when he wishes to speak to her: "Nothing to say! I have a gesture for you, but my hands are tied." That's right, Hawkgirl wants to flip him the bird.
- Remember, it's the DCAU.
- In the episode "The Balance" Wonder Woman receives a message from Zeus saying "By Decree of Zeus Father of Olympus it is so ordered: Dianna of Themyscira will travel to Tartarus and set right that which has been disturbed." She starts to respond with "He's telling me to go to..." but in interrupted by Hermes saying "Basically".
- Subverted in American Dad:
Hayley: The doctor said you have angina * This is a real disease . Francine: Which the doctor said sounds a lot like vagina but I don't hear it.
- Another episode has a secondary story revolving around bees. What's another term for "secondary story"?
- In an episode of Avatar The Last Airbender, the scene after greeting Suki in a robe, under candlelight, a rose in his mouth, Sokka is seen wearing a flower necklace - he got lei'd.
- In an episode of Family Guy where Stewie and Brian go to a Disney universe, this universe's Joe is a coffee pot. Joe. Coffee.
- Of course, that's a spoof of Beauty And The Beast, where the teapot is Mrs. Potts and her grandson is a teacup with a chip in it...named Chip.
- Teen Titans has one of the first type in the episode Can I Keep Him?. While fighting Johnny Rancid's new "pet", Rancid remarks that the beast is "kicking [Robin's]-", and is then interrupted by two green hooves to the gut. One shot later, it is revealed that Beast Boy has, indeed, turned into an ass.
- Maggie the housefly's older brother in The Buzz On Maggie is named Aldrin... for "Buzz" Aldrin.
- In A Matter Of Loaf And Death, Wallace attempts to stop Piella's bicycle by having Gromit throw tea cakes between his knees and the bicycle and squeezing them. He says he should have tried the granary rolls, which makes sense; after all, Let us break bread together on our knees... no?
- In the third season of Ben 10 Alien Force, Kevin ends up stuck in a composite form, with various body parts made out of various materials, from metal to crystal. In particular, everything from his groin down is made of wood.
- In Spongebob Squarepants episode "Karate Island" one of the enemies is named "The Tickler." He also happens to be French. Making him.. A French Tickler
- In Chip And Dale Rescue Rangers, the Team Pet is a fly named Zipper. The fact that this is a pun is never brought up.
- Late in the third season of Ben 10, Ben's antagonists consisted largely of aliens that resembled Universal/Hammer horror monsters, and he gained the ability to become each of them. First was a werewolf, which he cleverly named Benwolf. (Insert Gwendel joke here.) Next, a mummy, which was called Benmummy in the credits. The third villain, Dr. Vicktor, turned out to be a Frankenstein's Monster pastiche. The credits called the resulting transformation Benvicktor, avoiding the more obvious choice: Benstein.
Real Life
- There are a number of riddles of the form "What's the difference between a X and a Y?" where only the first half of the punchline is ever given, to avoid speaking profanity. Suffice it to say there are many half-punchlines with the word cunning in them, followed by a word that rhymes with hunt and doesn't start with the letter C.
- In the famous F.A.O. Schwarz Toy Store, New York City, there are a pair of life-sized stuffed animals over the display case for board games. They don't say, but they are, of course, cheetahs.
- While certainly not intentional, one of the largest elevator manufacturers in the world is the Schindler group. Schindler's Lift.
- A possible Stealth Visual Pun: as Richard Hammond pointed out on Top Gear, the Lamborghini Miura was built with doors shaped so that, when both were open, they looked like the horns of a bull. Lamborghini's logo is a bull, and the Miura is a breed of bulls.
- Arguably the AT-4 disposable rocket launcher. You'd only really get it if you knew a lot about guns, but it fires 84mm rockets. AT-4. 84. Geddit?
- Solaris uses the magic hexidecimal number 0xDEFEC8ED in certain debug outputs... specifically, core dumps.
- Cockney Rhyming Slang.
- The local highschool for Papillion, Nebraska, has "The Monarchs" for its mascot. Given that the town's name comes from the French word papillon, or butterfly...
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