These works have titles which are puns of some sort. The creators are probably slightly less proud of themselves than the creators of works with Double Meaning Titles. Or at least they should be. Like with the Double-Meaning Title, it's usually stubbornly resistant to translation to other languages, resulting in the need for a Completely Different Title.
Compare Justified Title. Idiosyncratic Episode Naming and "Miss X" Pun sometimes employs this. Translation Matchmaking may also lead to a Pun-Based Title. See Pop-Culture Pun Episode Title when the pun is based on titles of other works. When the pun is based around a character's name, use the subtrope of Epunymous Title.
Example subpages:
- Anime & Manga
- Comic Books
- Film — Animated
- Film — Live-Action
- Literature
- Live-Action TV
- Music
- Theatre
- Video Games
- Webcomics
- Western Animation
Other examples:
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Asian Animation
- Boonie Bears has a set of seasons that are all themed around the four seasons. All but one of them have a pun in their titles:
- Season 4 is titled Spring Into Action, using the word "spring" to mean both the season known as spring and to jump or leap into action.
- Season 5 is titled Snow Daze, a pun on the term "snow days".
- Season 6 is titled Sunsational Summer, using a portmanteau of the words "sensational" and "sun".
- Happy Heroes:
- The official English title of Season 8 episode 24 is "A Shocking Distance", referring to how the episode is about Big M. and Little M. being hit with a curse that causes them to be hit by lightning if they stand less than 99 feet from each other - you know, a "shocking" distance!
- The English title of Season 8 episode 35 is "Villains Always Shine". The episode is about Big M. consuming luminescent mushrooms that make his tummy glow, in a literal variation on a villain always shining.
- Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf:
- The season Marching to the New Wonderland includes the word "xīhā" in its Chinese title, meaning either "hahaha" or "hip-hop". This is a pun because the opening includes a hip-hop portion and the season itself is about Weslie's humorous adventures.
- The season Man Jing Tou uses this. "Manjingtou" means "slow motion", but the first word "màn" (slow) is changed into the word "màn" as in "manhua".
- Stitch & Ai features Stitch and a young Chinese girl named Ai, whose name is pronounced the same as the English letter and pronoun "I".
Fan Works
- The My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfic "Once Bitten, Twice Shy" does indeed ship TwiShy.note
- The 63rd Rune
does indeed involve Rule 63.
- Chapter 10 of The Lawyer and the Unicorn, "The Two Powers", is not only a pun on The Two Towers (the movie the group watches), but also refers to the two magic powers that are in play (Kurain's and Equestria's).
- Examples from the Calvinverse:
- Chapter 13 of Retro Chill is titled ""Feats Don't Fail Me Now."
- Calvin and Hobbes: The Series has the Two-Part Episode "Alien Nation."note
- Mega Man: Defender of the Human Race has Episode 12, called "Fade to Black" which focuses on the character of Mr. Black, and Episode 13, "A Big Splash," which introduces Splash Woman.
- Last Rights is a play on "last rites" and "rights of the deceased" or some such.
- Lupine Tree is a pun on pine tree and both definitions of lupine: a flowering plant that is similar to Jack's flowers, and wolves - fitting as Jack is a flowering, sapient timberwolf tree.
- The Keys Stand Alone.note Also some of the chapter titles.
- Triptych Continuum: A Total Eclipse of the Fun: The title is a reference to "A Total Eclipse of the Sun", which is what happens in the story, repeatedly. But it's also about how making it happen, isn't exactly fun.
- Story Shuffle: "Rock On": A story about magic, music, Magic Music, stones, and magic stones that relate to music.
- Highbrow Humor: In which Megatron's eyebrows start floating off his forehead after he stabs himself with Dark Energon.
- One chapter of Junior Officers is titled "A Pirate's Tail"; "tail" substituting for "tale".
Pinball
Podcasts
- The Twilight Histories “Hannibal One” takes place in a world where Carthage won the Punic Wars and crushed Rome. Or to put it another way, in this universe, Hannibal Won.
- The name of the Cordials of Kindness segment of Were You Raised by Wolves? is a pun on the adjective meaning "showing warm and hearty friendliness" and the noun meaning "a stimulating drink," like a cocktail.
Professional Wrestling
- The Frontier Wrestling Alliance show where Naomichi Marufuji and Minoru Suzuki came in to regain the GHC Heavyweight Tag Team Titles from Doug Williams and Scorpio was, in a reference to Pro Wrestling NOAH, "NOAH Limits."
Theme Parks
- At Universal Studios:
- Doctor Doom's Fearfall (fearfall = freefall)
- Madagascar: A Crate Adventure (crate = great), which involves animals being shipped in crates.
Visual Novels
- C14 Dating is named after a method for determining the age of an archeological find, all while being a Dating Sim set in a dig site.
- The fictional horror book Portrait of Markov in Doki Doki Literature Club!, insofar as the title is intentionally based on A Portrait Of My Double by Georgi Markov.
- The one for Double Homework is hard to see. The protagonist has to do “double duty” with his sisters at home... while he’s also in school.
- Hatoful Boyfriend, a game based around dating sapient pigeons, is a play on "heartful" and the Japanese word for pigeon, hato.
Web Original
- Baumgartner Restoration: Video titles are often crafted into puns, for example:
- A Heady Proposition: A painting of a severed head - revealed to be part of a depiction of Salome with the head of John the Baptist.
- The Bold and Beeautiful: A painting of a young lady wearing bee earrings.
- A Project of Titanic Proportions: A reverse-glass painting of the sinking of the RMS Titanic.
- Wood That It Were So Simple: A challenging conservation of a painting whose wood panel has split.
- Sea Change: A painting of the sea whose varnish had yellowed over time, resulting in it looking like a completely different painting at the end.
- A honorary mention goes to a canvas tote bag on the store christened the (sic) "tote ally awesome bag."
- Catsing Call is a cat-themed pun on "casting call."
- Every episode title of Deep Space 69 is a sexual pun.
- Game Theory, a show dedicated to video-game-related Wild Mass Guessing, is a pun on game theory, the scientific study of strategic and rational decisions.
- Many episodes of Inanimate Insanity II are titled this way. For example, episode 3 is entitled "Tri Your Best", which is a pun on the phrase "try your best" while also informing that the focus of the episode would be a triathlon; episode 6, "Let 'Er R.I.P.", is a pun on the phrase "let it rip" while also implying that a previously Killed Off for Real character would be returning; and episode 7, "Everything's A-OJ", is a pun on the phrase "everything's a-OK" while also referring to the fact that OJ replaces MePhone as the host.
- Keit-Ai has a pun-based title combining the Romanized versions of the words "Keitai" ("Mobile" as in "Mobile Phone" or "Keitai Denwa") and "Ai" (as in "Love"). This pun doesn't work using Japanese letters or characters.
- MrRepzion once made a video called, "Vampire Rants On Why Twilight Sucks." note
- Suburban Knights is a pun on "Suburbanites."
- In Farce of the Three Kingdoms, Chapter 3 is titled: In which the court loses the eunuch problem and gains a massive Dong problem.
- True Tail is a pun on the characters being Funny Animals.
- Gary: Landlord of the Flies:
- The blog's proper name is a play on "Lord of the Flies", a traditional epithet for Beelzebub.
- The blog's URL, "Stranger Than Eviction", references the common phrase "stranger than fiction."
