Visual Pun / Live-Action Films

"Sir, I pulled Ted Striker's record. I don't think you're going to like it.

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Visual Puns in Films — Live-Action.

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Creators

• Mel Brooks is a shameless user of visual puns:
  • Robin Hood: Men in Tights,
    • While addressing the assembled villagers, Robin says "lend me your ears". They promptly pelt him with (apparently human) ears. Robin is visually appalled.
      Robin: That is disgusting.
    • Earlier in the film, several slender men of middling stature in horse-racing clothes are seen mounted upon dromedaries. Those who don't get it is should know that "camel jockey" is a very derogatory term for a Middle Easterner.
  • Spaceballs:
    • When Lone Starr and Barf try to "jam" the radar on Spaceball One, they launch a giant jar of jam at Spaceball One's radar dish, causing raspberry jam to leak out of the control panels, thus prompting Dark Helmet's line...
      Dark Helmet (infuriated): Raspberry! There's only one man who would dare give me the raspberry... (pulls mask down) ...Lone Starr! ^note *CRASH!*
    • Later, some mooks are told to "comb the desert" for survivors. They get out actual giant combs (and an afro pick).Cue this exchange between Colonel Sandurz and Dark Helmet:
      Sandurz: Are we being too literal?
      Helmet: [through megaphone] No, you fool, we're following orders — we were told to comb the desert, so we're combing it!
• Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker as well (particularly David Zucker):
  • Airplane!:
    • "Okay, boys, let's take some pictures." (all the reporters run over to the wall and start pulling down the pictures hanging there)
    • "Two more minutes! They could be miles off course." "That's impossible. They're on instruments!" (cut to jam session in plane cockpit)
    • "When Kramer finds out about this, the shit's gonna hit the fan!" (SPLORCH! ...sssscHWOop!)
    • Jars of mayonnaise line the shelves of the Mayo Clinic
    • Ted Striker's "drinking problem" (he can't put the glass to his mouth and ends up splashing the drink in his face).
  • Airplane II: The Sequel did a fine job continuing the tradition, even though the ZAZ trio was not involved:
    • "Simon's turned to jelly!" Cut to a literal man-shaped, wobbling pile of jelly in Simon's clothes.
    • "Sir, I pulled Ted Striker's record. I don't think you're going to like it." (Shows a vinyl LP with the title "Ted Striker's 400 Polka Favorites".)
  • In Naked Gun 2½:
    Waiter: Sir?
    Frank: Give me the strongest thing you got.
    [the waiter waves over an oiled body builder]
    Frank: On second thought how 'bout a Black Russian?
    [the waiter looks at the camera and shakes his head]
• Turns up in a lot of Marx Brothers routines. Harpo is usually responsible for the "literal" version.
  • One particular instance is when he's trying to get into a secret room whose password is "Swordfish". When asked for the password, he promptly produces a fish and runs it through with a dagger, and is subsequently allowed in.
  • And if you're playing poker with Harpo, don't ask him to "cut the cards" unless you're using an inexpensive deck.
  • Groucho and Chico are running around trying to find a seal to make a document official. Harpo walks in and drops a live seal on the desk.
  • Also, when someone proclaims "Three cheers!" he promptly walks in carrying three chairs.
  • Mrs. Rittenhouse tells Harpo he has his choice of seats in a Bridge game. He promptly sits down in the lap of another woman.
  • In Animal Crackers, when Ravelli threatens to tell everyone who Chandler really is, Chandler offers to give him a check. Ravelli gives the check to the Professor, who drops it on the ground, and it literally bounces.

Films

• Across the Universe (2007): Prudence locks herself in a closet after falling for Sadie, who's straight. Her friends coax her to come out, with her embracing that she's a lesbian with their help.
• Addams Family Values:
  • When baby Pubert is being admired in his bassinet:
    Gomez: He has my father's eyes.
    Morticia: Gomez, take those out of his mouth.
  • The film also has a Gold Digger shown with a shovel in her hand, having just taken a wedding ring from a grave.
• The Japanese crime comedy film Adrenaline Drive combines this and Stealth Pun. The hero and heroine end up stealing from a Yakuza money laundering operation. Since the money was covered in blood when they got it, they take it to a laundry mat to clean — thus, they engaged in some literal "money laundering".
• In Back to the Future, Biff Tannen and his gang simultaneously yell "SHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIT!!!" before crashing into the back of a manure truck.
  • Biff does it again in Back to the Future Part II after Doc saves Marty from getting run over by Biff's car, which then slams into the same truck from Part I.
    Biff: MANURE! I HATE MANURE!
• Batman:
  • The Dark Knight:
    • During the car chase on Lower Wacker Drive, the Joker sends Harvey Dent's convoy underground by blocking their path with... a fire truck. That is on fire. A fire truck. More like a visual oxymoron, but still...
    • When asking the local mob leaders to contact him, the Joker leaves "his card," a generic Joker playing card.
  • The last shot of The Dark Knight Rises. John Blake is implied to be heir to the mantle of the Dark Knight, and as he stands on the platform in the Batcave... he rises.
• In Bedknobs and Broomsticks, King Leonidas' secretary is a literal Secretarybird.
• In Beetlejuice, after Beetlejuice protrudes spikes out of his body to stop being picked up while miniature, he starts feeling a little "anxious" and saunters towards a brothel that conveniently shows up nearby. (Juno had set it up to keep him distracted while she tongue-lashes the Maitlands to get them to scare the Deets out of their haunt.)
• In the final segment in the anthology horror-comedy Chillerama, a man gets kicked so hard, he shits. So yes, he had the shit kicked out of him.
• La Cité de la peur (City of Fear) has a lot of this. Examples include: "C'est une vraie boucherie" ("it's like a butcher's shop", meaning that a crime scene is very gory: the policeman enters an actual butcher's shop, looks terribly shaken, and then goes to the actual crime scene), "Jetez-moi ici" ("drop me here"), "la place du mort" ("the dead man's seat", in reference to the front passenger seat. Cue corpse being pulled out of the car's boot.) Some elements during the pursuit along the beach also qualifies. And finally, the "tapette géante" (which is the same word for a giant fag and a giant mouse-trap).
• City of the Living Dead plays this trope for horror in an infamous scene where a girl literally pukes her guts out while weeping blood. Both her intestines and her stomach get vomited out as the ghost of the evil priest that is doing this to her and the girl's horrified friend look on.
• French film Coco is entirely made of gags performed by its main actor (a humorist in life), but there's one glaring instance of a visual pun: Coco's teenage son wants to show his friend the house's "porcherie" (pigsty). Viewers start wondering why a Jewish man would keep swine in his house, until it's revealed that it was actually a porscherie (a room chock-full of Porsche cars!)
• At one point in "Crocodile" Dundee 2, Mick uses Sue's bra as bait for a Booby Trap.
• In Dancer in the Dark, Selma is seen lying on birch logs (during the musical number "Scatterheart"). Selma is played by Icelandic singer Björk, and in Swedish, Icelandic, and Faroese, "Björk" means "birch".
• DC Extended Universe:
  • Not really used for laughs, but there is an instance of visual pun in Man of Steel. At one point, Superman collapses onto all-fours due to exhaustion. Zod flies up to him and floats before him to taunt him a little. It took thirty-five years, but they finally had Superman Kneel Before Zod.
  • In Justice League, Wonder Woman is first shown in London standing on the statue of Lady Justice.
• Death Race 2000: In the original film, Frankenstein pulls off a glove and reveals his "hand grenade," a grenade built into his cybernetic hand.
• One of the monsters sent after the heroes in Dogma is the Golgothan, a demon made from all the excrement that gathered from the people crucified on the hill at Golgotha, including that of Jesus Himself. In other words, it is a literal Holy Shit.
• As an Affectionate Parody, Down with Love does a similar cut on the words "bosom buddies."
• Evil Dead 2. After Ash laughingly cuts off his possessed hand with a chainsaw and sticks it to the floor with a knife, he traps it under a bucket. Thinking it might somehow escape, he places a stack of books on top. The top book is A Farewell to Arms.
• In Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning, Mayor Cobb throws a bunch of cigarette ashes at Sheriff Tucker to illustrate his point that, as far as everyone's concerned, Jason Voorhees had been reduced to ashes following his death. He even goes so far as to refer to the cigarette ashes as "Jason".
• French movie Le Gendarme et les Gendarmettes as an infamous Removable Steering Wheel scene. "Passez-moi le volant." ("Give me the steering wheel.") is a standard expression in French to ask for the driving seat. Here, however, it is taken literally with Cruchot unplugging the wheel and giving it to Gerber, who plugs it back on his side. While the car is still rolling.
• G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra: The Doctor injects McCullen with nanomites to repair severe burns in his face, which turns silver, and right away the nanomites allowed the Doctor to control McCullen's, or Destro's, mind. Hence, the Doctor "regenerated" the Ninth Doctor.
• In The Great Dictator, the emblem of Adenoid Hynkel and his followers is the Double Cross. Hilarious in Hindsight, given the even more blatant backstab a year later: Barbarossa.
• In Hellzapoppin', a photographer asks Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson if he can take their picture. They agree and pose. the photographer walks past them and takes a picture off the wall and walks off with it.
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005): Marvin's arm is taken and pointed like it's a firearm.
• Hot Shots!:
  • People repeatedly tell the main character that he has his father's eyes. He actually does have them and keeps them in a box in his pocket.
  • In Hot Shots! Part Deux, one of the not-Iraqi soldiers is wearing a Holiday Inn towel instead of a turban, referring to the "towel-head" slur.
• A dissolve at the beginning of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull makes a molehill out of the Paramount mountain.
• In It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, the plot kicks off when one of the characters kicks a bucket in his death throes.
• In Jack the Giant Slayer when the cooking giant is making pigs in a blanket, he uses actual pigs instead of hot dogs.
• James Bond:
  • In Licence to Kill, the villain kills one of his own in a decompression chamber also filled with his money. When the guy explodes over the money, the villain, when asked what about the money, says "launder it."
  • One of the driving themes in Skyfall is betrayal. In the end, the main villain is literally stabbed in the back.
• The Jerk: Navin is berating a waiter in an expensive restaurant: "Two boobs! That's what he takes us for!" We get a shot of Marie glancing down at her decolletage.
• Kong: Skull Island: Discussed by Victor Nieves. He notes that if his group takes Marlow's jury-rigged boat up north along the rivers but they miss their window to be picked up off the island's north shore, then they will be quite literally up a creek without a paddle.
• In Loaded Weapon 1, a "Basic Instinct" Legs-Crossing Parody scene leads into a "gratuitous beaver shot" showing an actual beaver.
• In his opening narration for Love and Death, Woody Allen's character mentions the "valuable piece of land" owned by his father. An old man pulling a hunk of sod from inside his coat is seen.
  "This land is not for sale! Someday, I hope to build on it."
• Lover Come Back: "Believe me, the agency that lands this account is the one that shows the most attractive can." The scene then cuts to a certain part of a Chorus Girl's anatomy.
• Men in Black: International: A alien wearing Nerd Glasses at the MIB Headquarters is (literally) four-eyed.
• In The Playhouse, Buster Keaton plays a stage crew member at a theatre. Early in the film, as he is clocking in for the day, he looks at the sign reading "punch clock" So he does. Right in the face, too...
• Pirates of the Caribbean:
  • Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl: Jack is attempting to pick a lock with a bone. It's a skeleton key.
  • Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End: Davy Jones' Locker is filled with crustaceans that normally appear as stones, or in other words, "Rock Crabs".
• Popeye:
  • At one point, Bluto is so angry to see Olive with Popeye that he sees red.
  • At the end, the defeated Bluto turns yellow and swims away.
• In Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time Sheik Amar, after running from a fight, hides behind a chicken coop.
• In the classic Lovecraft-inspired horror-comedy Re-Animator, the Big Bad gets decapitated fairly early on, and then reanimated as a classic shambling carrier-of-one's-own-head. Toward the climax of the film, he abducts the female lead and straps her down to a surgical bench, and... well, the head gives her head. The writer was reportedly so pleased with this that he called the producer and said excitedly, "I've just written my first visual pun!"
  • Early than that, there's a lingering shot of a Talking Heads poster in protagonist Dan Cain's room - it's The '80s and Dan is depicted as a nerd, so it would make sense that he'd be a fan of the quirky New Wave Music band... But it's also foreshadowing the aforementioned Big Bad, Dr. Hill, becoming a literal "talking head" .
• The Rise of Skywalker: In the second-last shot of the film, we see BB-8 against the horizon of Tatooine, where one of the two suns is rising behind the other, giving them exactly the same silhouette as BB-8.
• Scott Pilgrim vs. The World — which is marinaded in Video Game Tropes — has Scott walk off purposefully as a friend asks him what he's doing. He responds, "Getting a life," and snatches a 1-Up out of the air.
• Slow West: During a gunfight, a shot breaks a jar of salt, which pours into a character's wound, underscoring a figurative 'insult to injury' moment with a literal one.
• In Song of the South in its first musical number, a couple of birds come to hum as backup music. They're "humming" birds.
• Star Trek:
  • In Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, a Scotsman walks into a bar. (Scotty bumps his head and knocks himself out.)
  • In Star Trek, it's James T. Kirk who literally walks into a bar.
• Star Wars: In Rogue One, Darth Vader's wordplay to Director Krennic — "Be careful not to choke on your aspirations, Director." A good piece of advice to any over-ambitious Imperial, which becomes quite literal considering the Sith Lord is Force-choking Krennic while delivering it.
• An early Superman reference: in the very first Superman serial, we see little Clark Kent pulling a full size haywagon. (What? Didn't you pull a wagon as a kid?)
• Terminator 2: Judgment Day: The T-800 conceals a shotgun in a bouquet of roses, which is appropriate given that the movie featured Guns N' Roses in its soundtrack.
• In TRON: Legacy, when Kevin Flynn repairs Quorra's damaged code, he pulls out the erroneous parts, clasps them in his hands, and lets go. The damaged code then flies away in an insect-like fashion. He was literally debugging Quorra.
• Up Pompeii films:
  • Up Pompeii:
    • When Scrubba is helping Lurcio in the kitchen, he gives her some onions and a cucumber to hold, but the way he puts them in her hands resembles male genitalia.
    • Lurcio mentions he'll have to keep an eye on an undressed girl he finds after Ludicrus Sextus' orgy while holding a glass eye:
      Lurcio: "Eye", huh. (Beat) Oh, please yourself.
  • In Up the Front, Lurk claims he won't fight in World War II as he has the kids to look after, followed by him walking down the street with lots and lots of goats.
• Used for horror in Videodrome as Max's handgun becomes overtly literal later on. There's also a literal handgrenade at one point.
• Who Framed Roger Rabbit:
  • While walking through the Maroon Studios, Eddie sees a group of Toon cows waiting in line for an audition; a literal "cattle call".
  • Shortly thereafter, he sees two movers accidentally drop a crate, from which springs a bunch of Toon chairs playing instruments; literally "musical chairs".
  • The bouncer at the Ink & Paint Club is a literal Toon gorilla in a tuxedo. Eddie lampshades the pun with "nice monkey suit".
  • Eddie orders a "scotch on the rocks" from one of the penguin waiters at the Ink & Paint Club, which is staffed by Toons; seeing this joke coming, he then shouts after the waiter, "And I mean ice!" When the penguin comes back with the order, the glass is full of scotch... and rocks, real ones. "Toons!" Eddie says in disgust.
  • Later, in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it example, as Eddie drives into Toontown he runs over a pie with a cow's face on it: a "cow pie".
  • Around the end, one of the weasels puts his hand in Jessica's cleavage, only to get caught in a bear trap. Hence Eddie's comment: "Nice booby trap!"
  • And when it's revealed that Judge Doom is a villainous Toon, he literally "stares daggers" at Eddie.
• The Wizard of Oz: Once granted proof that Dorothy was sent by the Witch of the North, the gatekeeper exclaims, "That's a horse of a different color! Come on in!" The carriage transporting Dorothy and her companions through the Emerald City is drawn by the Horse of a Different Color — appearing in a different color every time a new scene shows the horse.
• X-Men: Apocalypse:
  • Quicksilver is in a Rush T-shirt as he's rushing through the mansion. Later, the words I LOVE RUSH are written on his cast just above the knee.
  • There are stylized horsemen on Jean Grey's pillow case, and she later has to face the Four Horsemen in battle.
• The Stinger in Zombeavers presents the movie's Sequel Hook as one: One of the infected animals lying in a pool of its own blood is seen, as are various insects buzzing around. The camera then pans up to a beehive. ZOMBEES!

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