A showcase of puns hits the social media platforms whenever a huge news story breaks out. Twitter explodes with an array of fantastic manipulations of language ranging from acceptable to Dad-jokes, all the way to stinkingly offensive. In the mane area of the horse-meat burger scandal, my favourite was a tweak of Shakespeare's most famous line from Hamlet: "In beef or not in beef, that is equestrian." Intelligent on so many levels. When I shared this pocket of pleasure with my boyfriend, he didn't quite enjoy it as much as I did.
But is this a normal pleasure or should I mark it in the guilty pile? Puns do appear to be more popular in the Dad-joke arena, sharing some air time with bad birthday cards, but that shouldn't make them any less indulgent. Another of my top five does happen to be one of the most uncool jokes in the world, possibly the universe: "You're so street, you're practically pavement." It made one of my colleagues laugh, anyway, so I'm taking that as a win. No one needs to know that she then remarked that the things that come out of my mouth are just plain weird.
Surely word play jokes are a way to show how well you know a language and should be honoured in the highest form of wit, should you be so clever as to be able to come out with them straight away. For example, at another workplace, my manager was telling us how she needed to take the afternoon off to fix a gate at home. After the long-winded story, I accepted her excuse and said "Well, as long as you're replacing a gate and not taking a fence." A groan and a giggle meant it was well received. Tag-team puns would happen in my student job whereby we would unknowingly set up a beautiful corker and congratulate or punish the joker where appropriate.
Long may we pun.
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