Pity the pun. Spurned as the lowest and dullest form of wit, the pun elicits groans not giggles. Charles Lamb called the pun “a pistol let off at the ear.” Ambrose Bierce defined the pun as “a form of ...

At its core, a pun is a play on words which meshes two usually unrelated words together in an attempt at humor. It depends heavily on paranosmia, exploiting similarly sounding phrases or words to ...

From the moment he spoke, I knew I was screwed. On the surface, the guy wasn’t particularly fearsome—pudgy, late thirties, polo shirt, plaid shorts, baseball cap, dad sneakers—but he looked completely ...