The Pun Collection
Puns are little “plays on words” that a certain breed of person loves to spring on you and then look at you in a certain self-satisfied way to indicate that he thinks that *you* must think that he is by far the cleverest person on Earth now that Benjamin Franklin is dead, when in fact what you are thinking is that if this person ever ends up in a lifeboat, the other passengers will hurl him overboard by the end of the first day even if they have plenty of food and water.
Dave Barry, “Why Humor Is Funny”
The driver of a huge trailer lost control of his rig, and ploughed into an empty toll booth, smashing it to pieces. Some time after the driver had reported the damage, he watched as a repair truck pulled up and discharged a crew of workers. They picked up each broken piece of the wreckage and spread a creamy substance on it. Then they began fitting the pieces together. In less than a half hour, they had the entire tollbooth reconstructed and looking good as new.
“Astonishing!” said the truck driver to the crew chief. “What was the white stuff you used to stick all the pieces together?”
“Oh, that was tollgate booth paste.”
Mahatma Gandhi was a very spiritual man who would walk barefoot for miles helping the poor. Such was the extent of his walking that he developed exceptionally hard skin on the soles of his feet. This walking, coupled with other exertions, often left him in a very weakened state, but nonetheless he remained able to perform his clerical and spiritual duties, administering mystical remedies to the poor and sick.
However, one disability that depressed him greatly was his renowned bad breath, brought on by a combination of over exertion, poor hygiene and a bad diet.
It was these factors that led some historians to describe him as a “super calloused fragile mystic hexed by halitosis.”
These two blokes are lost in the Sahara desert. They’re desperate for water, but just as they think they’re about to die, they chance upon a village where market day is in full swing. They go to the first stall they see and ask if they can buy some water.
“No,” replies the Bedouin stall owner, “I only sell fruit. Try the next stall.”
So off they go to the next stall and again they ask for water. “Sorry,” says the merchant, “But I only sell custard.”
“Custard?” one of the blokes says to the other, “What kind of place is this?”
By now desperate, they go to the next stall, only to be told, “Sorry, but I only sell jelly.”
Hearing this, one of the blokes turns to the other and says, “This is a trifle bazaar.”
While Nostradamus was alive, he was in great demand by the various churches and temples in the area. Since this got to be a strain running from place to place, the religious groups got together and hammered out a schedule where they would each get Nostradamus’ services for one or two days a month on a rotating basis.
It was the world’s first prophet-sharing plan.
Recently a guy in Paris nearly got away with stealing several paintings from the Louvre. However, after planning the crime, getting in and out past security, he was captured only 2 blocks away when his lorry ran out of gas. When asked how he could mastermind such a crime and then make such an obvious error, he replied:
“I had no Monet to buy Degas to make the Van Gogh.”
A neutron goes into a bar and asks the bartender, “How much for a beer?”
The bartender replies, “For you, no charge.”
Two molecules are walking down the street and they run in to each other. One says to the other, “Are you all right?” “No, I lost an electron!”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m positive!”
A group of chess enthusiasts checked into a hotel and were standing in the lobby discussing their recent tournament victories. After about an hour, the manager came out of the office and asked them to disperse.
“But why?,” they asked, as they moved off.
“Because,” he said, “I can’t stand chess nuts boasting in an open foyer.”
A doctor made it his regular habit to stop off at a bar for a hazelnut daiquiri on his way home. The bartender knew of his habit, and would always have the drink waiting at precisely 5:03 p.m. One afternoon, as the end of the work day approached, the bartender was dismayed to find that he was out of hazelnut extract. Thinking quickly, he threw together a daiquiri made with hickory nuts and set it on the bar. The doctor came in at his regular time, took one sip of the drink and exclaimed, “This isn’t a hazelnut daiquiri!”
“No, I’m sorry,” replied the bartender, “it’s a hickory daiquiri, doc.”
There was a man who entered a local paper’s pun contest. He sent in ten different puns, in the hope that at least one of the puns would win. Unfortunately, no pun in ten did.
A woman has twins, and gives them up for adoption. One of them goes to a family in Egypt and is named “Amal.” The other goes to a family in Spain; they name him “Juan.”
Years later, Juan sends a picture of himself to his mom. Upon receiving the picture, she tells her husband that she wishes she also had a picture of Amal.
Her husband responds, “But they are twins – if you’ve seen Juan, you’ve seen Amal.”
An incompetent ship captain grounds the warship he walks on.
Some people say my puns are sleep-inducing, but I keep laudanum anyways.
A marine biologist developed a race of genetically engineered dolphins that could live forever if they were fed a steady diet of seagulls. One day his supply of the birds ran out, so he had to go out and trap some more. On the way back, he spied two lions asleep on the road. Afraid to wake them, he gingerly stepped over them.
Immediately, he was arrested and charged with transporting gulls across sedate lions for immortal porpoises.
A famous Viking explorer returned home from a voyage and found his name missing from the town register. His wife insisted on complaining to the local civic official who apologized profusely saying, “I must have taken Leif off my census.”
There were three Indian squaws. One slept on a deer skin. One slept on an elk skin and the third slept on a hippopotamus skin. All three became pregnant and the first two each had a baby boy. The one who slept on the hippopotamus skin had twin boys.
This goes to prove that the squaw of the hippopotamus is equal to the sons of the squaws of the other two hides.
I remember the case not too long ago of the scientist that cloned himself. However, his clone was very obnoxious, while the scientist was well received and respected. Finally fed up with his experiment gone wrong, he threw his clone off the roof of the laboratory; killing the clone.
He was arrested by the local police for making an obscene clone fall.
The Cleveland Symphony was performing Beethoven’s Ninth. In the piece, there’s a long passage – about 20 minutes – during which the bass violinists have nothing to do. Rather than sit around that whole time looking stupid, some bassists decided to sneak offstage and go to the tavern next door for a quick one. After slamming several beers in quick succession (as bass violinists are prone to do) one of them looked at his watch.
“Hey! We need to get back!”
“No need to panic,” said a fellow bassist. “I thought we might need some extra time, so I tied the last few pages of the conductor’s score together with string. It’ll take him a few minutes to get it untangled.”
A few moments later, they staggered back to the concert hall and took their places in the orchestra. About this time, a member of the audience noticed the conductor seemed a bit edgy and said as much to her companion.
“Well, of course,” said her companion. “Don’t you see? It’s the bottom of the Ninth, the score is tied, and the bassists are loaded.”
BONWAG 