Discussion Main / LamePunReaction

I'm not sure if this is the right place to put this, but I feel like fake accents are treated much the same way, even when the country or culture they're emulating is not another race.

About the main quote in the page: You guys mind if I change the quote to this one from Sponge Out of Water?

Mr. Krabs: I'm not your enemy, Plankton is your enemy!

Squidward: So is he an anemone or a plankton?

(rimshot)

Mrs. Puff: Well, someone had to do it.

I'm not sure about the Doctor Who "Eleventh Hour" example: my interpretation of that scene was that everyone was staring in disbelief at an inept attempt to be "cool", like Ten's "correctamundo" only more so. Even if the writers intended a pun on "Who" being the name of the show, it's surely invisible to everyone in the scene since they don't know what the show's called, so they can't be reacting to it.

Am I the only one who is a little annoyed at the fact that this trope uses some very ablist language? can we change the word to something other than "lame" please? Like sad, or sorry, or I don't know, someone come up with something else, because as it stands, "lame" to mean pathetic is really offensive to a lot of people with disabilities

I have just now deleted the entire Real Life section, because none of these examples included any reaction to a pun:

• The iCup urinary drug test.
• When British Major-General Napier conquered Sindh in 1847, he supposedly sent a telegram with just one word: "Peccavi". Bilingual Bonus: This is Latin for "I have sinned" - "I have Sindh".
  • This may be a Beam Me Up, Scotty!, as the first written record of it is in the diary of an Edwardian schoolgirl who'd recently learnt that bit of colonial history.
• Paul Merton and Ian Hislop, the team captains on Have I Got News For You, both adore puns, and will throw out dozens of them at the slightest opportunity. The studio audience often can't decide whether to roar laughing or groan.
• A great deal of commentary on the professional basketball player Jeremy Lin involves Lincredibly Lame Puns.
• Blood donors card: "A gift from the heart." (Although, technically, the human body manufactures blood in the bone marrow.)
• When newly Communist Cuba threatened to cut off water to the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, the servicemen created their own water supply and, in an act of defiance, dismantled the pipes. Of course a photo of the event appeared with the caption, 'Dismember the Main!' (Explanation of joke: The Spanish-American war was kicked off by the sinking of the U.S.S. Maine, which was harbored in Spanish waters. Later analysis revealed that the ship had not in fact been torpedoed, but had sank of its own accord, but that didn't prevent American warmongers from bellowing "Remember the Maine!".)

tvtropes does not know of a good pun. In tvtropes, all puns are Incredibly Lame. Without exception. Period.

On the other hand, if people are more interested in the page as a vehicle for pun-related potholes, why not just redefine the trope as the meta-idea it represents, i.e. puns as so lame that just about everyone, even This Very Wiki owns up to it.

The examples could stay under the heading of in-universe reactions in which puns are insulted.

C'mon! This is supposed to be for in-universe examples only. Why allow it to stay as a pothole magnet for puns in general? I know it was at first.

A possible pun in Shakespeare. In <i>The Merchant of Venice</i>, when the Duke of Venice is asking Shylock to forgo his demand for a pound of Antonio's flesh, he ends his speech with "We all expect a gentle answer, Jew." The word "gentle" may or may not be a pun on "gentile".

Clearing out examples that don't include any mention of a reaction from the other characters. If there is such a reaction, replace the examples and include the information about the reaction.

Anime:

[Excel Saga]

• And, in the English dub of the anime, a soldier asks Excel, "What is your purpose?" in thick Japanese accent. Excel replies, "A type of fish?" (This isn't in the Japanese version, obviously.)

• Onani Master Kurosawa sort of has one as its premise - at least, if you read an English version. You see, it's a Coming of Age Story about masturbation. It's a lot Better Than It Sounds.
• Ranma 1/2
  Dr. Tofu: Ah, it's bread! (Pan da!)*Turns to Mr. Saotome* "And you're a "Panda" aren't you?" *Chuckles*
  * In Yu Gi Oh a villain masquerades as Kaiba's ghost and Yugi is told twice that he doesn't stand "a ghost of a chance"
• The dub of Pokemon might as well have its own page. Mind you, the original Japanese was just as bad sometimes.
  Meowth: It's A pika-palooza!
  Jessie: We're at the PIKA our power!
  James: CHU can say that again, Jessie!
  • "Maybe it's a...COW-terpie!"

Comics:

• The old Sonic the Hedgehog comics. Oh god, the old comics.

Film:

• Attack Of The Clones Threepio, whilst his disembodied head is being dragged by R2, says "What a drag!" And then when his head ends up next to his body, he adds "I'm quite beside myself." Allegedly written by Tom Stoppard, no less, after he was brought in to polish up George Lucas's dialogue...
• Batman And Robin like, everything that Arnold Schwarzenegger/Mr. Freeze says in that movie. And a lot of what Poison Ivy says. It's so painful to listen to.
  • Let's kick some ice!
  • What killed the dinosaurs? The Ice Age!
    • That was supposed to be a JOKE?
• 2 years before: Holey rusted metal, Batman!
  • [Scott Pilgrim vs. the world] Also from that movie: "I'M A LITTLE BI-FURIOUS!"
• From Payback, during a bit of torture where someone's toes are getting smashed with a sledgehammer.
  Torturer: This little piggy went to market.
  THUMP
  Big Bad: It's starting to look like roast beef.

Literature:

[Discworld]:

• Captain Carrot is occasionally fond of these too, he presents Vimes with a watch on his (first) retirement as Captain of the Night Watch. It's inscribed with "A Watch from, your friends in the Watch." The "This is a pune or, play on words" explanation appears this time in a letter to his parents.
• Nobby Nobbs is another good example.

• This Troper's English book, The Bare Essentials: Form A, has a number of funny sample sentences, some of which (paraphrased below) are also quite punny:
  • "Does the name 'Pavlov' ring any bells?
  • "The book on levitation was fascinating; I couldn't put it down."

Live Action Television:

[Buffy]

• From season seven.
  Willow: I guess it's true; scythe matters.

• There was the episode where Roz was missing home, and the bad cheese puns they made. Frasier's reply? Don't cry Roz. I... camembert it.

• Supernatural parodied this when Sam and Dean were trapped by Gabriel in "TV Land".
• One episode of Thats My Bush features an actor playing Charlton Heston as the head of the NRA. Twice in that episode, he made a pun so bad the audience groaned: He picked up a copy of People magazine as he stormed out of the Oval Office. A dispute erupted as to who owned the magazine. When the secret service agents tried to wrestle it out of his hands, he bellowed, "LET MY PEOPLE GO!"
• There's an episode of LazyTown where Robbie switches Sportacus's shoes with fake shoes that make his FEET go crazy. The Title? Defeeted.
• Some of Talkin Bout Your Generation's rounds have very silly names, such as "What's A Doodle Do?" (teams must identify logos), "Era Error" (teams must identify anachronistic items in a scene from the past), and so on. Shaun delights in these puns whenever he can get away with it.
• In Battlestar Galactica, Gaius Baltar shouts, "No more mister nice Gaius!"
• How I Met Your Mother has a lot of these. Partly because Ted's the Pungeon Master, partly because the writers adore puns. Ted's puns are pretty universally bad, though.
• Fringe has turned this into an art form:
  • Walternate and Fauxlivia for Walter and Olivia's Alternate Universe counterparts.
  • No-Brainer is the name of an episode about people's brains melting. Earthling is the name of an episode about people turning to dust. The Same Old Story is an episode about rapid aging.

Music:

• Kip Adotta "Wet Dream" is a song completely composed of fish puns.
• Eminem ft. Rihanna's song "Love the way you lie":

  Eminem: Now you get to watch her leave, out the window. Guess that's why they call it window pane.

• Da Vinci's Notebook's song "The Captain’s Wife’s Lament" is set around a terrible sailor-related pun. It's one pun, one pun repeated over and over and over ...

Roleplay:

• In We Are Our Avatars, Mammon seems particularly fond of these, which range from merely bad to truly cringe-inducing.

Video Games:

• Runescape is filled with bad puns. Frequently pointed out by various characters.

• The heroes throw in these every once in a while, saying things like "Sorry I'm starting to BUG you! GET IT... BUG you?" or "Prepare to meet... your LO Lsuit!!" or even "It has been a toad-ally un-frog-ettable experience!"

• MOTHER 3 has two puns about vines in chapter 1.
  Alec: We need to vined the vine.
  And later...
  Alec: Da vines go up because they're divine.
  • Flint's silence during those lines only makes them funnier.
• Lego Harry Potter for the X-Box 360 has an achievement for having Snape hide inside a barrel named Solid Snape.
• Just Cause Why? Just 'Cause. *cue Wah-Wah music*
• League Of Legends. Vlad. Just... Vlad. Everything he says is a groan-inducing blood pun. And the raven champion's root spell is called Nevermove.

Webcomics:

• Dominic Deegan: Puns of all kinds are standard operating procedure for the comic (many characters showing off how bad they are by looking towards the "readers".
• In this strip of Concerned, the protagonist iterates through a series of incredibly lame puns trying to conceive a tagline worthy of the moment.
• Sub Space from Collar 6 (although it should be noted that the term existed in the BDSM community before its use in the comic).

Web Original:

• Almost all the creature names in Mortasheen are some variant of this.
• CSI: Miami 4-Pane Comics are based off the often-terrible one-liner puns that Horatio Cane of CSI: Miami uses to open each show.

• Holocaust jokes are bad.
• Well, I hope this guy's alright.
• We don't know much about Jesus's childhood.

• The Chaos Timeline features some for/four puns on a prominent level.
• The Advice Dog spin-off Lame Pun Raccoon is this trope made meme.

Western Animation:

[South Park:

• Totally justified in "Butter's Very Own Episode". Just look out for the newspapers.

• Jafar does it in an episode of Hercules: The Animated Series when he teams up with Hades (who himself comments on it a lot).
  • Also in the Hercules TV show, Zeus slams Hades with a lightning attack, dropping him down an instant chasm. Zeus then follows up with, "Have a nice trip. See you next fall." Whether or not Hades' subsequent groan came from the impact or the pun is not specified.
• In the Spongebob Squarepants episode "Pranks A Lot", Spongebob and Patrick get their hands on a can of invisibility spray.
  Patrick (spray's Spongebob's hand with the spray): I gotta hand it to you, Spongebob, that is pretty funny!
  Spongebob (snatches the can and sprays Patrick's stomach): Kinda gives ya an empty feeling, huh?
  Patrick (snatches can back and sprays Spongebob's eye): Yeah, I see what you mean!
  Spongebob (snatches the can and sprays Patrick's abdominal area): No guts, no glory!
  :: This is eventually interrupted by a title card reading "Several Bad Puns Later".
• Overused during the intervals on Disney Channel that it stops being funny very, very fast. Lame one-liners like "Ferbulous adventures" or "Bean waiting long?" are just scratching the surface.

• There's also the aptly named Buzz Killington:

Buzz Killington: Stewie, do you know why W.S. Gilbert was frequently drunk on his Transatlantic crossings?

Stewie: Ugh, no?

Buzz Killington: Because, (chuckles) he was quartered on the port side. Ohohoho...

• The Critic does this from time to time. In one episode, he is told that he 'has started to repeat himself' and three different tapes of his review of a Tom Cruise movie have him say the exact same horrible pun (that he himself is hysterical over)

  Jay: "Tom Cruise doesn't act anymore. He's on CRUISE CONTROL!"

  *starts laughing uncontrollably*

  Jay: "I JUST MADE THAT UP!!"

And this one doesn't even seem to be an example of a pun at all, with or without in-game reaction, simply an "I Thought It Said":

• Then there's a more subtle one later in the series— Apollo Justice, which features Trucy doing her "magic panties" act in the "Wonder Bar". If you've ever read that wrong, you've doubtlessly come away with the impression that Trucy uses her magic panties in the Wonder Bra.