Pun-Based Title

aka: Punny Title

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 and Punny Name. 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
• Western Animation

Other examples:

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.
• The Lamput episode title "Soccer Punch" is a pun on "sucker punch". The episode itself is about Lamput messing up a game of soccer that the docs are playing in.
• The Mechamato episode title "Out of Cone-trol" is a portmanteau of "out of control" and "cone" referring to the episode's threat being cone creatures.
• 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".

Comic Strips

• Madam & Eve is named after the Biblical characters Adam and Eve, naturally.

Fan Works

• The My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfic "Once Bitten, Twice Shy" does indeed ship TwiShy.^note Twilight Sparkle and Fluttershy
• 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 & Hobbes: The Series has the Two-Part Episode "Alien Nation."^note alienation
• 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 The Cheese Stands Alone 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".
• In-Tents-ly Sick combines "intensely" with "tents", since it's a Camping Episode.
• Cure Wingman combines Cure Wing's name with "wingman", since the fic is about Tsubasa wingmanning for Mashiro.
• We Won't Tell You to Heel has a pun on "heel" and "heal".

Pinball

• Jack*Bot is a pun on "jackpot". This even extends to the actual jackpots, which are called "Jack*Bots."

Podcasts

• Some of the titles of the chapters of The Adventure Zone: Balance are based on puns.
  • The first Lunar Interlude is called "Moonlighting", which refers to the act of having a second job in secret, often at night. The interlude is about our heroes joining the Bureau of Balance, a secret organization stationed on a false moon.
  • "Petals to the Metal" is a play on the phrase "pedals to the metal". The arc involves drag-racing to beat an enemy with total command over nature, primarily plantlife.
  • "The Eleventh Hour" refers to the time period just before a pivotal, often catastrophic, moment. In this case it's much more literal — Taako, Merle and Magnus end up stuck in Refuge, a town caught in a one hour-long time loop that starts at 11 AM (aka, the eleventh hour) and ends at noon, when a gigantic worm destroys the whole town.
• 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."

Radio

• The BBC Radio 4 sitcom Beta Female, about a young Asian-British woman, is a play on "alpha male", but also referring to "beta" as a Hindi term of affection for a young person.

Tabletop Games

• Cootie Games: Ants in the Pants, Don't Break the Ice, and Don't Spill the Beans are all puns on American-English idioms^note being antsy, getting to know someone, and giving away a secret, respectively, but also depict the object of the game.

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.

Webcomics

• Awkward Zombie's creator loves wordplay titles. The title of almost every strip in the comic is a pun of some sort.
• Brawl in the Family = all in the family + Brawl.
• Claude & Monet, for obvious reasons.
• Com'c features an art style that doesn't show eyes. As such, it is an i-less comic, i.e. a com'c.
  • The pun extends to the word used for an individual strip - Com'c strips are officially dubbed "str'ps".
• Darths & Droids abbreviates to D&D. Lampshaded in the FAQ.
• Dork Tower is a play on the Stephen King novel series The Dark Tower
• Heroine Chic is a play on the phrase "heroin chic", a look popularized in the 90's that takes its name from the effects of heroin use on the body. "Heroine" (a female hero) and "heroin" (the drug) are homophones.
• iToons combines this with Double-Meaning Title: it's both a pun on iTunes and a reference to the fact that it presents imaginary strips from other comics (i.e. iToons).
• Kevin & Kell is a pun based on the expression "heaven and hell".
• In Level 30 Psychiatry, most of the strips have pun-based titles, one to the point that significant ones can be identified by the fact they don't.
• Spoofed in The Non-Adventures of Wonderella, where every strip is given an intentionally horrible pun-based title.
• One-Punch Man is titled "ワンパンマン" in Japanese, which reads "wanpanman", which is a play on Anpanman, which the series pokes fun of.
• Partially Clips, whose title is pronounced the same as "partial eclipse".
• Unsounded: Several of the page update link titles are puns based on what's happening on page, such as "He Really Urned That Defeat" for chapter 16 page 96 in which Glover gets crushed into the shape of a nearby urn while fighting a more powerful wright.
• War and Peas plays on "war and peace".
• Pretty much every single Whomp! strip has a pun for a title, like "Push and Pool", "Tragic Carpet Ride" or "Booty Sleep".
• Work Sucks follows the characters at their jobs that happen to involve a lot of monsters and gadgets that have vacuum breath.
• YU+ME: dream , where the Japanese word for "dream" is yume.
  • From the same author, Meaty Yogurt needs to be spoken aloud with an American accent for the pun to be apparent.

Web Original

• In Angel Hare, Gabby is, indeed, an angel who is a hare. "Angel hair", besides a type of pasta, is another term for tinsel, probably the in-universe pun on the name. However, it's also an alleged sticky substance often seen around sightings of the Virgin Mary...or UFO encounters.
• 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."
• The Chuckle Sandwich podcast's name is a play on 'knuckle sandwich' and the humorous nature of the show.
• 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  A Stealth Pun referring to how vampires suck blood.
• 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.
• Chess.com's chess-based NFT project is named Treasure Chess, a play on "treasure chest" and "chess".
• 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."
• The podcast What Could Possibly Go Right? references the common phrase "What could possibly go wrong?"
• Most chapter titles in Njal Gets Burned, including several with Njal's name, such as "Tooth and Njal," "Last Njal in the Coffin," etc.
• Wookieepedia, a Star Wars wiki on Fandom, is a pun on the Wookiees and Wikipedia.

---