Visual Puns in music.
- Many album covers are built around visual puns based on their titles. For example, the cover of Moving Pictures (Album), by Canadian rock band Rush, features up to three different puns: a group of men carrying paintings from a museum, as in moving the pictures, a group of women crying at the sight of the paintings, being moved by said pictures, and a person filming the whole thing, making a moving picture.
- The cover image of another Rush album, Permanent Waves, also has visual puns related to the title. There is a wave of water, the man is waving his hand, and the fabric of the woman's clothing is waving in the wind; all of these "waves" are permanent because it's a photograph. Also, "permanent wave" is the name for the woman's hairstyle.
- Tom Lehrer's comedy song "Bright College Days" includes the line "To thee we sing with our glasses raised on high". When performing the song live Lehrer would illustrate the line by removing and holding up his spectacles, a joke unfortunately robbed of impact on recordings.
- In the music video to "Weird Al" Yankovic's "Fat", there is a section where Al and friends start running in one direction while yelling "Hoooo!"... at which point one of the backup dancers hands Al a hoe. During live shows, the hoe will either be carried by a guy dressed as a woman (yet another pun on the word "hoe") or by Santa Claus ("ho ho ho").
- The Michael Jackson video "Leave Me Alone" (originally part of Moonwalker) includes a few scenes that involve dogs wearing business suits. In other words, "corporate dogs".
- blink-182: Take Off Your Pants and Jacket (already a Punny title) has on its cover a traffic light with a graphic icon in each circle. "Pants" and "jacket" are just literal representations, but the top (red) circle has an aeroplane punning on "take off".
- Queensrÿche's Hear In The Now Frontier: While the "now" part isn't really represented, the cover features ears in jars spread out across, well, an Old West frontier.
- In Psalty's Singalongathon Maranatha Marathon Hallelujah Jubilee, Psalty's wife trips on a bucket that was left on stage. The bucket's purpose: helping the kids carry a tune.
- The cover of R.E.M.'s Lifes Rich Pageant is a picture of drummer Bill Berry coupled with a picture of some bison, as a visual pun on "Buffalo Bill". This also qualifies as a Stealth Pun, since the cover art has nothing to do with the album title, and the actual words "Buffalo Bill" don't appear anywhere else either.
- Roger Daltrey's Tommy Reborn Tour is accompanied by an animation projected onto a screen behind the band. We start with an ovum being fertilized by a sperm, which then turns into a red, white and blue ball, which is then dropped into the eye of a bird, representing Tommy Walker's conception. After Captain Walker goes off to war, various stylized images of a battle field including the Bird!Tommy carrying a Thompson Submachine gun in its feet are seen. That is to say, it has a Tommy gun.
- Van der Graaf Generator's album A Grounding in Numbers has a cover illustration of the circuit diagram symbol for "ground" over a background of 0s and 1s.
- Brad Paisley plays a guitar with a paisley pattern on it.
- The cover of REO Speedwagon's You Can Tune A Piano, But You Can't Tuna Fish shows a fish with a tuning fork in its mouth.
- But you can tuna fish!
- The cover of Blue Öyster Cult's Agents Of Fortune depicts a tuxedo-clad man who's probably meant to be a Tuxedo and Martini spy holding up some tarot cards - thus a (secret) agent of fortune (-telling).
- Pavement's video for "Cut Your Hair" involves each of the members waiting in line to get haircuts and having some wacky occurrence happen when they get to the barber's chair. When Mark Ibold approaches the chair, he sneezes out a cat, which he then gives away to the barber - at the time Ibold was also in a band called Free Kitten.
- Erasure's "A Little Respect" video is full of visual puns on the song's lyrics: for instance, whenever Andy Bell sings "I'll be forever blue", his face becomes tinted blue, and the word "soul" is represented with a sign from the 1988 summer Olympics in Seoul, and also with soles (as in bottoms of shoes, as well as fish). They even manage to do this with the title drop - as Andy sings "give a little respect to me", he's handed a little sign with the word "respect" on it.
- The cover of Squeeze's East Side Story has the second "e" of the band name in a much smaller font size than the rest of the letters - thus, it looks like that letter is being "squeezed" in the middle of the word.
- The Hipgnosis studio frequently created images that were literal interpretations of figures of speech. Some examples:
- Pink Floyd's A Nice Pair
used artwork that consisted entirely of visual puns, beginning with the front cover which depicted a nude woman (with a "nice pair" of breasts) holding up a fruit (a "nice pear"). "Frog in the throat", "Laughing all the way to the bank", "Fork in the road", etc. (Not to mention the innuendo-laden "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush".) - Climax Blues Band's Tightly Knit: "Put a sock in it".
- Capability Brown's Voice: "Zip your lip".
- Prototype's self-titled album◊: "A little birdie told me".
- A press ad◊ for Roy Harper's Flashes from the Archives of Oblivion in which the singer praises himself depicts him with a literal swelled head. There's also an illustration of a bull shitting at the bottom of the ad.
- UFO's Force It has a cover illustration of a room containing many faucets.
- 10cc's Deceptive Bends has the band members and an unknown guest star character wearing Creepy Old-Fashioned Diving Suits as a pun on "the bends of a diver".
- Big Jim Sullivan's Big Jim's Back shows Sullivan facing away from the camera while wearing a Fun T-Shirt with the album title. Yes, it's literally Big Jim's back.
- Pink Floyd's A Nice Pair
- Alice Cooper's Greatest Hits had artwork referencing The St. Valentine's Day Massacre, a famous murder of mob associates - thus, it's a play on "hit" as in an assassination.
- Why does Mudhoney's Piece Of Cake cover art include a slice of birthday cake sitting inside a public restroom urinal? Well, one term for a urinal deodorizer block is a "urinal cake".
- AC/DC's Fly On The Wall: not only does the cover depict an actual fly on an outhouse wall, but the title, which is rendered as carved Bathroom Stall Graffiti, has a peephole with someone looking in where the "y" would normally be: So, "Fl(eye) On The Wall".
- Leon Russell's Hank Wilson's Back, Vol. 1, recorded under the pseudonym Hank Wilson: The album cover is a collage depicting the artist performing in front of an audience, facing away from the camera. So, in other words, like the Big Jim Sullivan cover above, the artwork depicts "Hank Wilson's back".
- Cledus T. Judd parodied Toby Keith's "Red Solo Cup" as "Double D Cups". The video for his parody features several extras drinking out of red Solo cups in one scene.
- The music video for Styx's "Too Much Time On My Hands" involves a watch salesman with a Coat Full of Contraband trying to sell his wares to one of the band members, only for him to roll back his sleeve and reveal he already has over half a dozen watches on his arm.
- The album cover for Sparks' No. 1 in Heaven includes a picture of a spark plug in the top right corner.
- In the video for Poets of the Fall's "Lift," during his psych screening, Mad Dreamer Mark sometimes retreats to a Happy Place which takes the form of rooms in a mental house, one of which seems to be an attic filled with toys.
- The original, more well-known cover for The Rolling Stones' Sticky Fingers (a close-up of jeans with a noticeable bulge and an unzippable fly) was evidently deemed too risque to market in Spain - Spanish listeners got a cover featuring severed fingers inside a can of treacle instead.
- The cover to Donna Summer's single "On The Radio" (as well as a similarly named Greatest Hits Album) depicts her sitting on top of a large, old-fashioned radio receiver.
- The cover of Meet The Bloody Stools by hard rock group The Bloody Stools spared the listener an actual depiction of what their band name implies, going with a drawing of bloody bar stools instead.
- Phish's Hoist has an image of a horse hanging from a pulley on the cover because a Working Title for the album was Hung Like A Horse - it still works as an Accent Depundent play on "horse" as spoken in an exaggerated Brooklyn accent.
- Methods Of Mayhem's "Get Naked" includes the lyric "ride the cock" - in the music video Lil' Kim is seen riding on a mechanical rooster puppet. MTV censored the lyric but still showed her riding on a literal "cock".
- The Soul Asylum song "Misery" features references to "making misery." The song's video includes footage of a manufacturing plant where the CD single of "Misery" is being manufactured and packaged — in other words, it's making "Misery."
- The Cantonese pop song "Tsim Sha Tsui Suzie" is a bouncy song about a wild party girl in Hong Kong. The lyrics mentions her father "sells salted eggs", which may be an euphemism for being dead; and on top of that the video shows her father being a white man, which won't make sense until you know "ghost" is slang for a white person.
- The cover of the Paul McCartney album New is a stylised version of the album name, in neon. The name of neon means "new".
- John Conlee's Signature Song is "Rose Colored Glasses". No points for guessing what he wears when he performs the song in concert.
- Foghat's second self-titled album is sometimes referred to as Rock n' Roll because the cover depicts a rock and a bread roll. Their debut, also self-titled, has an illustration on the back cover of a man wearing a literal "fog hat", as in a hat that's emitting steam (the band name was really just a nonsense term one of the members made up).
- The Swedish version of Basshunter's "Boten Anna", about a bot that cleans up their "channel", has a music video of the singer pedaling a boat around a canal. In Swedish, you might as well say he's pedaling a bot around a channel.Hon røjer upp i våran kanal.
- Sepultura's Roots has in the cover an Indigenous woman surrounded by roots, thus the title in both the anthropological and botanical senses.
- Animusic: In "Pogo Sticks" the points where the instruments go under a bridge on the track are also the "bridges" of the song being played.
- The official Death Grips YouTube channel's upload of "Black Paint" features an image of a person dressed as the Grim Reaper while holding a can of black paint; Death grips black paint.
- The cover of the King's X album Tape Head - a tape head is a transducer used in tape recorders, but the artwork depicts band member Doug Pinnick as a literal "tape head", wrapped in recording tape from the shoulders up.
- The B-Side of "Ricky's Hand" by Fad Gadget is an instrumental remix titled "Handshake". The back cover of the single features a comic strip depicting a man putting his hand in a blender with gory results: He's making a "hand shake".
