The pun is often seen as a very low form of humour. If you’re having a conversation and someone makes a pun, the audience are likely to groan and complain. They will however, be amused. They will laugh or at least smile. It’s a valid and useful form of humour and I’ll explain how it’s useful in cartooning, and particularly in corporate cartooning.
What is a pun?
First let’s look at the anatomy of a pun. A pun is a play on words, where you use one word (or group of words) that sounds like another, but has a different meaning. The English language is stuffed with such word pairs such as:
- place, plaice
- sun, son
- stationery, stationary
- time, thyme
- seafood, see food
And sometimes there are more than two words that fit the bill, such as: pair, pear, pare
You can create a pun when you have one word with several different meanings. Examples are:
- Patient: A person under medical care, tolerant
- Sound: Trustworthy, a large body of water, a noise, to measure the depth of water, etc.
Then there are words that almost sound the same, such as prawn and pawn. I could go on, at some length, but I don’t want to put anyone to sleep. You get the idea.
So why are puns held in such disregard?
You’ve probably all heard the old joke “I’m on a seafood diet, I see food and I eat it!” Now even I groaned when I typed that. That’s because it’s old, it’s boring, everyone has heard it, and it’s been done to death. This is why puns have a bad name. We start to hear and use them as kids, and by the time we’re all grown up we’ve had enough, and moved on to more “sophisticated” forms of humour.
To make a good gag for a cartoon using a pun you have to insert the element of surprise and use wordplay that hasn’t been heard before. If I tried to use the seafood pun in a cartoon for a client I’d have to think up something amazingly innovative, or it would be rejected, and I’d be unlikely to work for them again. However, the familiarity with the words used in the pun can work well for some corporate cartooning situations.
If you are selling a commodity, such as soap, your audience will be the great unwashed (sorry) and the language you have to use to communicate is general, all purpose English. In this situation it is going to be difficult, but not impossible, to come up with a fresh pun. I know cartoonists who live and breathe puns, they raise it to a high art, and I have no doubt they could do it impressively.
Where to use puns
The best place to use puns is where you are using cartoons to communicate to a specialist audience. As I said earlier, we’ve grown up with puns, we understand them and even though we groan when we hear or see one, they amuse us and we like them. What better vehicle to get across your company message?
Creating puns for a specialist audience is easy in that it’s wide open – few people have been there. A specialist pun, say based on the musical term “compound time”, won’t have been bandied about in the playground for the last 50 years. There could be some difficulty because you have to have some knowledge of the domain in order to come up with relevant puns. I don’t find this to be a problem. As a business analyst I’ve had a lot of experience getting into different technical domains very quickly, so getting enough understanding to create a good gag isn’t too hard.
Say you care, with a pun
The last and overwhelming argument for using a pun in a specialist domain is what it says to the reader, which is: We understand you. We understand you so well that we were able to amuse you in your own language.
I might groan with everyone else, but I like puns and find them effective. I have no qualms about keeping them in my portfolio of humorous techniques for corporate communication.
Here’s that very specific compound time gag. Compound time being a time signature where each bar is divided into three parts (or a multiple of three) as opposed to simple time which is divided into two even parts (or a multiple of two).
Its a very simple gag, but a musician will appreciate it.
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