In what can become a regular feature with your help, welcome to the first ‘pun watch’. Please feel free to put some of your favourite puns in the comments section below. Meanwhile, Chris Caton takes out the inaugural award. Not necessarily a truly great pun, but it tickled my fancy. Headlines are often a good place for puns and Chris headed today’s commentary on the US Fed’s seventeenth consecutive interest rate increase “Summer of the Seventeenth Hike”.
I also remember Chris for a joke he told at a conference I was at. Someone had stolen his wife’s credit card but he hadn’t reported it because the thief was running up much smaller bills than his wife used to. Ba-boom. My wife liked it anyway.
Should you wish to guest post in pun watch, in the future, just email Troppo pun HQ at puns AT gruen DOT com DOT au.
I predict that Homer Paxton will win it hands down most weeks. Maybe we should disqualify him in advance to give others a chance.
Homer will certainly win if all he’s got to go up against is Summer of the Seventeenth Hike, which is hardly London Pun material. (Not much is.)
The best puns are unintentional. When I was a kid we had a pet baby kangaroo for a few weeks and it was a hell of a job keeping the damned critter from jumping the fence. In exasperation, my mum said: “I rue the day we ever got that animal.”
My favourite is the camping store which advertised “Now is the winter of our discount tents”.
Well, I’ll certainly pay that one. Fantastic. Reminds me of a headline in (I think the Sydney Morning Herald) about an Australian diva who had fallen ill while on tour and was to travel back to Australia. “Sick Gloria, in transit Monday”.
There was a website on American media I used to read several years ago and on it they had a section for unfortunate headlines. The one I remember most was about when Richard Burton (actor) was ill and the response of Elizabeth Taylor – “Liz says she’d do anything for Dick”
The site was http://www.poynter.org/medianews/ but I couldn’t find the section anymore.
re: previous post. If you want an extensive list of punnish headlines and other assorted media cock-ups, the previously mentioned site can be found on http://www.archive.org using the URL http://poynter.org/medianews/extra10.htm
A Uniting Church in Melbourne used to have a banner out front “carpenter inside, joiners wanted”.
ah, good one Z. i liked a recent local ad for a building company offering “weapons of mass construction”.
puns were big in our house due to dad being a sub. i remember him and his mates debating best puns, one that springs to mind involved a diplomatic incident and was headlined, “Man Held in Attache Case”.
not sure if it’s a pun, but i think William Burroughs’ Baboon should be turkey slapped for his latest headline…(i feel so innocent but that expression (er, and what it refers to) is entirely new to me).
Just don’t start on the chicken puns.
They’re fowl
Some are eggscruciatingly bad