Basic Trope: A joke that plays on two words having the same sound, but different meanings.
- Straight:
- Spencer tries to buy cigarettes, but Mary tells him he can't because he's a minor. Spencer says, "No, I'm not! I've never even been in a mine!"
- Mary's going on vacation, and she'll be traveling by plane. Spencer asks "plain what?"
- Exaggerated: Mary says, "Putting meat on sale can turn a profit." Spencer says "I don't think I'll be meeting any prophets, sailing or not."
- Downplayed: Mary says, "Be careful!" Spencer initially hears it as "bee careful", but realizes that doesn't make sense.
- Justified:
- Spencer is hard of hearing.
- Spencer isn't a native English speaker and still has to learn some words.
- Mary has bad diction.
- Inverted:
- Mary uses four different definitions of the same word in one sentence, but Spencer understands her perfectly.
- The words Spencer thinks he hears are the exact opposites of the originals.
- The words Spencer thinks he hears is spelled the same as the one Mary actually said, but has a distinct pronounciation.
- Subverted: Mary goes to work early in the day, and Spencer calls her to ask where she is. She says, "I'm in, morning." Spencer understands perfectly.
- Double Subverted: But Mary then asks, "Are you sure you can make it?" and Spencer says "I don't live near the shore."
- Parodied:
- Mary says "I see!" Spencer says, "The sea is made of water, not eyes."
- Mary tells Spencer to write "I idle here, in my steel cell." Spencer writes, "I idol hear, in my steal sell", and genuinely believes this is what she said.
- Zig-Zagged: Mary uses a sentence that has a bunch of words that could be confused for homophones. Spencer mixes up some of them, but not others.
- Averted: Nobody in the work has a misunderstanding over words sounding the same.
- Enforced: After a bit of confusion, Mary wants to use different words to ensure her sentences won't be misunderstood. To do so, she looks at a WordCo-brand thesaurus.
- Lampshaded: "I said 'minor', Spencer! Not 'miner'!"
- Invoked:
- Mary phrases her sentences so that the words might be easily misheard for homophones.
- Spencer pretends to mishear on a lark.
- Exploited: Mary insults Spencer and calls him weak, but then claims that she was saying "week".
- Defied: Spencer has Mary spell the word out loud so he knows what she means.
- Discussed: "Are you sure you understood what I said? I know some words sound the same, but they mean different things."
- "You know," Erudite Stoner Spencer tells Mary, "the word 'homophone' itself can be a homophone." Mary's mind is blown.
- Conversed: "I don't think anyone in real life would confuse those two words. Doesn't the context make it obvious?"
- Implied: Mary tells Spencer that she likes sweets. The next day, Spencer is seen booking hotels for her, suggesting that he heard "sweets" as "suites".
- Played for Laughs: Mary says she'll "go to work tonight" and Spencer, incredibly excited, asks "You're a knight!?"
- Played for Drama: Spencer overhears Mary saying "deer" and thinks she's saying "dear", then suspects she's cheating on him.
- Played for Horror: Mary works as a clothes dyer. When she is violently wounded by an attacker in the workplace, she calls Spencer to tell her that she's dying, but he thinks she's making a joke and doesn't understand how serious the situation is
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