How Puns Fail

The worst kind of failed pun is the one that goes over the head of 80% of an audience and is not funny enough to goad the understanding 20% into laughter. Nobody loses their head about a Shakespeare or classic quotation pun. Time, after thousands of years of flight, has crash landed and is buried in mud and silt. In fact, in cases where quotations are misunderstood or archiac the capacity for pun failure is often in excess of 200%; in languages other than English some puns have an estimated failure rate of 800%, give or take a few percentage points for intersecting dialects.

Punning isn't very easy. Puns vary. Puns fail. Puns miss their target. Puns go awry and offend. Puns are errant, and they elude wit, and they emerge at inopportune times. Aside from a few, typically lazy newspaper headline puns, I have gone without seeing any noteworthy puns for years. It's been months since I made a good pun. I don't even know if I can.

And I'm thinking very hard about a 'canned laughter' style pun, but this is a destitute internet blog, not a sitcom. I could use some star power, but I need longevity, not light echoes. Okay that was a pun that is not even astrologically sound. Now I'm on a roll, but I am unsure whether anyone will detect the gravity of these recent puns...

Indie band names are great for punning. For instance, take this band name meant to criticize the famous Indie Rush of 2002: The Blanque Cheques. It has that aroma of ennui and distracted annoyance, which serves to castigate both the target and the medium, which is beautiful; it also features intentional misspelling to emphasize the point that American English does not have a properly spelled version of 'cheque' which is an outdated way of transferring money from a financial account by writing details on a prepared document and endorsing them by signature.

Other groan-inducing, indie band names I hastily thought up to impress my non-audience:

• Shoegazer's Telescope
• No Sound Unturned
• A Tribe Called Reverb
• Tempo? Fugit.
• A Voice to Scry For
• Distracting Derivative Demi-movement