Aren't they all? New Crowner 10/17/11: Incredibly Lame Pun

Courtesy Link to the discussion page topic about this. Short version- in the world of TV Tropes, apparently all puns are lame puns. This is starting to bug people.

Crowner. I don't have much of a stake in this personally, but this issue is a bit of a nuisance and someone needed to get the ball rolling.

Sooooo... Let's say that tropers agree on cleaning up Incredibly Lame Pun, as the crowner options suggest. When that happens, who gets to decide which puns are and aren't lame?

edited 4th Nov '10 9:02:12 AM by SeanMurrayI

Agree that the trope needs redefinition.

Suggest that the new definition is about puns that are incredibly lame In-Universe, or intentionally delivered to get a groan.

EDIT: nevermind, apparently it's already supposed to be that. Then misuse should be obvious.

edited 4th Nov '10 9:07:49 AM by mmysqueeant

Think back to how Incredibly Lame Pun started.

We used to have the page Incredibly Lazy Pun (now Stealth Pun). People kept potholing there inappropriately for any pun, so Incredibly Lame Pun was created to give tropers a place to Pot Hole to.

It becoming a trope came later.

Basically, using it as a Pot Hole seems to be the page's original purpose and is already well ingrained into the collective consciousness.

I do think the trope is tropeable, so perhaps it is most appropriate for the content should be moved to a new title.

^^^ Well, the easiest way is by whether a character in the work comments that it's lame. You know, like the trope description already specifies — "This trope refers explicitly to when these puns are referred to as lame in-series."

There's nothing wrong with the page or the name. It's the potholing.

edited 4th Nov '10 9:10:24 AM by Madrugada

I get the concern but I don't necessarily see Incredibly Lame Pun as the tropology equivalent of I Am Not Making This Up or So Yeah. First off, it's usually attached to an actual pun.

Rather than impressed as judges of humor, I'd far rather we decide to either keep the meme or kill it entirely.

Move the trope to a different page, and make Incredibly Lame Pun an example-less pothole target.

I've been guilty of the potholing myself, I know - just can't remember where, I'm afraid.

Surely there are enough unarguable pun tropes (Punny Name, for instance), that we can use the specific type of trope for a pothole, instead of this rather generic one?

It's my belief that some tropes (Stock Phrases, especially) can be used and invoked by tropers themselves on the forums and in Real Life as much as they can in the works we catalog with them.

An Incredibly Lame Pun is no more a tool whether it's used by a fictional character or an actual person. The nature of how the phrase is being Pot Holed is irrelevant.

edited 4th Nov '10 9:24:59 AM by SeanMurrayI

By the nature of the beast, every Incredibly Lame Pun will also be an Epic Pun Of Win. Seriously. Tropers like me, we groan and roll our eyes while simultaneously struggling to hold back satisfied laughter.

Potholing to Incredibly Lame Pun is fun, we like fun.

If we kill it specifically because it's fun we let Wikipedia win.

Make a new page for in universe lame puns, make this a pothole link or a index for Pun tropes and a pothole link.

Though there already is an index for pun tropes.

I think claiming your opponents are enemies of fun is ever so slightly Strawmanning it. Possibly in a deliberate attempt at a parody, in which case, hooray! Partial Success!

I love puns. Why can't we have a page called Incredible Lame Puns for potholed puns, instead of sticking with a title that doesn't cover most of the examples linked to it, and getting rid of an excellent trope that covers a lot of genuine examples? Why do we HAVE to repurpose the useful trope as a useless (but fun) YMMV, when we can just create a YMMV to stand alongside it?

I've also had a couple of jokes I've made potholed to Incredibly Lame Pun for me, which is...irritating. Especially as one of them wasn't even a pun, if anything it was Sarcasm Mode! It's really abused.

edited 4th Nov '10 9:42:40 AM by mmysqueeant

I've just cleaned up the example list on the main trope page to take out those which didn't indicate what the In-universe negative response was. There were lots less than I expected...

Incredibly Lame Pun is what tropers Pot Hole their puns to because by the mere nature of Pot Holing it you admit its a Pun. And its not like Tropers actually put their puns on the trope page. I think there's not much problem with the Pot Holing as it stands.

Right now Incredibly Lame Pun serves two purposes - it's both a trope for a certain kind of pun and a page that people pothole any pun to, whether or not it fits the trope. That's a problem.

Ah, I remember last time we had this discussion. I argued that since the trope was about the reaction to the pun and not the pun on its own, it shouldn't be potholed every time there's a pun. Someone else argued that every pun would eventually get such a reaction, so such a pothole was always accurate. That this thread exists is testament to who won that argument.

I think the cleanup was all that was needed here.

Edit: I need to go add the Persona 4 later (my phone has a character limit) they are bad in universe... a couple of times they threaten to have him shot because they were so bad.

edited 4th Nov '10 10:36:39 AM by Raso

It needs a wicks clean up much more than it needed the example clean up — the examples weren't really very bad.

And saying that it's a legitimate pothole to any pun, because someone, somewhere, sometime, is going to react negatively to any pun is ignoring the definition of the page: "A pun made in a work that gets a negative reaction in the work."

edited 4th Nov '10 10:35:43 AM by Madrugada

Tropes aren't limited to just works though. If anything, the definition should be "A pun that gets a negative reaction."

edited 4th Nov '10 10:38:57 AM by SeanMurrayI

Well, that's just giving anyone the excuse to link an INCREDIBLE pun like, say, The Sun's

Super Caley Go Ballistic Celtic Are Atrocious

to Incredibly Lame Pun. And the day that happens is the day the last drop of humour has gone from this dessicated world.

^I don't see the pun (Edit: No wait, now I do that's a pretty big stretch for something about a British Footy Club—I think), and this is getting too much into subjective viewpoints of entertaining humor.

Though, indeed, that's probably where this discussion is likely headed.

edited 4th Nov '10 10:51:00 AM by SeanMurrayI

The advantage, then, is that a trope of 'characters reacting badly to puns' is far less subjective and thus more easily tropable.

Tropes are storytelling conventions. Not simply "Anything that happens." There is a convention to have other character react badly to a pun; a convention that the creator of the work deliberately chooses to use.

Piers Anthony is a good example — his Xanth series is crammed full of puns. Most of them go completely unnoticed or unnoted by the characters. But very occasionally, he has a character react in a strongly negative way to one, for purposes of characterization or plot. The vast majority of the puns in Xanth, then, are not tropes. They're just puns.

In that case, wouldn't the proper name be That Pun Was Lame, to focus on the reaction rather than the pun entirely?