Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with pun

To Meemaw, from Beepaw -- decades of family brainstorming

cranberry_nut — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 09:05:21 -0800

Please help solve a riddle from a 1943 family postcard During Thanksgiving dinner this year, guests were presented with a family mystery. Among a stack of family photos was a postcard that my great-grandfather sent to my great-grandmother while away on business. It is postmarked "Mobile ALA" 3/16/43 and addressed to their home in New Orleans.

It reads as follows.

Dearest:
I ran across and bought for you today something you have been wanting for quite a while. No, it wasn't a fur coat, fur I don't have the money fur such articles. In fact it was a pair, but not stockings. Actually it was two pair and they are a kind of silk but they are not cloth. Another peculiar thing is they are utterly useless except when turned upside down, but they are always left right side up. Will bring them over this weekend so you won't die of curiosity. Love to all and don't work too hard, Ralph.

We've been unable to determine what the gift was, and it's now driving us a bit crazy. Do any of you have any thoughts?

(Note: the "fur" instead of "for" is likely unrelated to the riddle. That's just him having fun.)

I choo-choo-choose you.

phunniemee — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 14:34:58 -0800

Looking for cutesy little puns of the kids' valentine variety. I would like to make a series of love notes for my guy in the style of those lame valentine's cards we all got as kids. I plan to draw a little picture to go with each note, so short and simple is best.

Obvious ones:
"I choo-choo-choose you" (thanks, Ralph Wiggum!) with a picture of a train.
"Bee mine" with, you know, a bee.
"You're my sweetie" with a candy or something.

I would love to hear some suggestions that are more creative, clever, and have better puns. Any ideas?

Thanks!

Where is Orwell when you need him?

gagoumot — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 13:00:50 -0800

If a pig was running for office, what would his/her slogan be? I am having some art made for some colleagues' and my offices. Since we work in politics and animal agriculture, I thought it would awesome to have campaign posters of the 7 major species running for office. They can either be running individually or as a pair - such as a chicken and turkey running on the same ticket. Now I am looking for campaign slogans.

Here is the list of major species.

Dog
Cat
Cow
Horse
Pig (Bringing home the bacon?)
Turkey
Chicken (A me in every pot?)

Preferences:

While these may be in a professional environment, I am not averse to making a couple extra for my house, so no limits on common decency.

Bonus Question: Every other animal is considered (by the FDA) to be a minor species. What would be the funniest animal to be "the voice for the minority"? A llama? A gold fish?

Thanks in advance, and have fun!

Dont leave me hanging on the telephone...

gergtreble — Tue, 19 May 2009 07:04:43 -0800

Help me find on hold music for my company. My company recently asked me to come up with suggestions for on hold music. So far we have come up with:

Call me - Blondie
Hanging on the telephone - Blondie
Hold me - Fleetwood mac/savage garden

oh and

Never gonna give you up - Rick Astley (Yay! Rickroll)

So give me your best witty on hold suggestions!

Help me find a Grass-Mud Horse t-shirt on the Web!

killdevil — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 14:11:43 -0800

Apropos of the recent MeFi front-page post concerning Grass-Mud Horses: could the Mandarin-speakers in the audience help me locate a place on the Web to buy a t-shirt featuring said animal? I haven't had any luck locating such an item on the English-language Web, but I'm sure there must be one for sale somewhere.

Loving you is no mis-steak, but this pun is

k8lin — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 21:44:52 -0800

Help me think of a pun or a short poem about barbecues, meat, and love. I got my boyfriend (who loves, loves to cook, especially grilling) a card for Valentine's day with a really cool grill filled with sausages and hamburgers on the front. It's really nice and well-made, but it was originally a birthday card for a dad so I have to glue a new message on the inside. I'd like to glue a cute saying, well-written poem (preferably by a known poet), or a stupid pun on the inside that has something to do with barbecue or meat and love. All I can think of is "Loving you is no mis-steak," but I'm seriously hoping for something better.

You think puns in one language are bad...

[ixia] — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 01:24:57 -0800

Bahasa Indonesia speakers! My late, beloved grandmother was an expert in dreadful multi-lingual puns. Help me remember a silly joke she used to tell about roosters. This joke can only be told well by someone who speaks heavily accented English, and you need to know a little Indonesian to laugh at the punchline.

Here is what I remember of the joke:

One evening, a woman is hurrying along the street, carrying her shopping. A man is running towards her, not looking where he's going. He crashes into the woman and knocks all her groceries into the gutter.

"Oh!" says the man. "I am sorry, I am sorry!"

The woman looks afronted. "Ayam sore? AYAM SORE?!"
[English translation: A chicken in the evening? A CHICKEN in the EVENING?!]

The woman then yells something at the man which translates in English to: "A rooster in the morning!"

What is this punchline in Bahasa? And where is the pun, slang or implied insult which I remember made the joke so funny? It could easily have been something a bit risque - her English jokes were fairly ribald!

I'll probably never tell this joke as well as she did, but I will send an enormous plate of love and virtual tempeh goreng to anyone who can help me remember how it went.

Spanish obscene pun?

Bizurke — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 00:33:10 -0800

Is there an obscene pun on this Spanish-language t-shirt? (photo/nsfw language inside) When I first saw this t-shirt, I read it as "I have a hair on my tongue, but I don't know what pussy (/cunt/some other slang term for vagina) it's from." Later on, I found out that in Spanish, or at least peninsular Spanish, you can throw in "coño" to mean, more or less, "fuck" or"fucking." So, I presume, it's possible to read the t-shirt as "I have a hair on my tongue, but I don't what the fuck it's from."

My question: Is this ambiguity intentional? Is this a pun? Or do my mediocre Spanish skills transform it into a pun?

NOTE: I took this picture in the gift stores around Peñiscola, in the Autonomous Community of Valencia, in case that makes a dialectal difference.

What was the make of that motorcycle in Ratatouille?

hwestiii — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 13:55:09 -0800

Ratatouille (movie) detail question In the movie "Ratatouille", the female chef drives a fancy motorcycle. At at least one point during the film, you can see the "brand" of the motorcycle dispalyed on the gas tank. I only saw it briefly and incompletely, but it appeared to say something like "Calamari", which strikes me as totally in character with Pixar's organizational sense of humor.

Can anyone confirm that this is the case or set me straight if its not?

Butch Cassidy and the Spuddance Kid

idiotfactory — Mon, 14 May 2007 11:56:10 -0800

Hey Mouse Potatoes! What does this tshirt mean? I saw someone wearing a t-shirt over the weekend that I can't figure out. Basically it boils down to an outlaw potato "holding-up" three other potatoes. I drew a picture of it on an online sketchboard so all of you visual types can see what I am talking about.

Blank Do It... Blank

chase — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 06:32:50 -0800

Where is a list of all the "blank do it blank"? I saw a poster a long long time ago, that was filled with -- just about -- every occupation and every sport... each statement was a sexual innuendo or pun about what the type of person did related to the job or activity. The only one I can think of right now is "teachers do it with class." Doing a google for "do it" was just plain silly. I'm specifically looking for statements for drafters or CAD designers; but finding the entire list would be especially fun too.

Make up fortunes for fortune cookies!

aws17576 — Wed, 27 Dec 2006 17:51:58 -0800

Querying the hive wit: Help me come up with fortunes for homemade fortune cookies. I would like fortunes that can stand on their own... but if they happen to make good double-entendres when suffixed by "in bed," so much the better. (The benchmark to beat, in my own fortune-cookie-opening experience, is "A handful of patience is worth a bushel of brains.")

Non-original fortunes are welcome if unusual and interesting, but please, I already know that the onion I'm eating is your water lily.

Bonus: If you have actually made fortune cookies, do you have a preferred recipe, or any advice on how not to screw them up?

First Gouda pun?

scottreynen — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 15:09:15 -0800

What was the first documented pun on the word "Gouda"? I've recently taken to eating a lot of Gouda cheese, because I like the taste. When talking about this with others, I often run into obvious puns because "Gouda" sounds like "good." This led me to wonder how early such puns started appearing. From what I've read, Gouda was named after the town of Gouda, which was founded in 1272. I assume the first English speaker to encounter Gouda made a pun, but what is the first documented example of this happening? The earliest I've found so far is 2003, which is pretty weak.

Is the lack of a pun the pun?

lasm — Tue, 23 Dec 2003 10:17:33 -0800

In an interview, Joseph Heller talks about Catch-22 and a pun based on the character Sheisskopf. He says there's an additional pun in the book, which at the time of the interview, no one had found. (more inside) I've read the book over, and searched the usual sources, but cannot find it. Does anyone know? Here's the relevant excerpt from a 1975 Playboy interview.

Playboy: There is a minor character in Catch-22 named Scheisskopf. At one point someone refers to him as Shithead, with a capital S. Since Scheisskopf is German for shithead, it works like a pun, though it looks as if the capital letter were a typographical error. Was that intentional?

Heller: Yes, and you're the first one to comment on it. I've waited 14 years for someone to pick that up. I've blabbed it to a couple of people myself, but nobody's asked about it.

Playboy: Are there any more so-far-undetected jokes in Catch-22?

Heller: There is one more.
Playboy: Any chance you'll tell us what it is?

Heller: No chance at all.