I tell many, many, many bad puns, as anyone who has hung out with me knows. What many may not know is how much preparation and mental remapping has gone into this process.

The two key factors in the success of a pun are Timing and Obscurity*.

By Timing, I mean that the pun has to be said close enough to the sentence it is riffing on so that the short term memory of the listeners is willing to go back and look and compare, to find the humour/reference. If you wait too long, you risk your listener timing out** and ignoring you, as they have already forgotten the specifics of the original sentence. Too soon, and the listener has not finished understanding the meaning of the original sentence, and the pun sentence will pass them by.

By Obscurity, I mean that puns which are too obscure will cause the listener to think about the pun for a brief while, then time out and move on. Puns which are too obvious will cause a groan as the pun wave collapses, and the listener will move on. Only a pun somewhere between these, where the listener is subtly forced to engage their brain will get the reaction you desire***.

Complicating matters is that Obscurity is defined differently for each listener****, as each listener will have different amounts of knowledge in each area. So, you’re constantly juggling what you know of the knowledge levels of each of your listeners, and trying to find puns that will fit inside enough of the Timing and Obscurity windows of your audience.

What can help is Sentence Prediction. Just like Amazon can tell that you will need toothpaste before you do, you can predict what words someone will say in a sentence before they know themselves. Once a person has started a sentence and is about halfway through, it is remarkably simple to predict how they will finish the sentence*****. More importantly, it is easy/possible to predict the exact words****** they will use, as you will need the exact words they will use in order to generate your pun.

So, you’re listening to someone speak. Partway through their sentence, you fill in their sentence with what they’re going to say. You then spend the next couple/few seconds planning your pun, you wait until they’re done speaking, and then you strike! Mental chaos ensues! Coyote is happy.

Want to hear more about this? Let me know in the comments below!

*I use ‘Obscurity’ instead of ‘Difficulty’ here because a specific pun will have different ‘Obscurity’ levels for each listener, depending on the specific shape of their knowledge/experiences.

**I’m using ‘Timing Out’ in the sense of the computer term ‘Timeout‘, where after a certain defined period of time, the computer will simply go and do something else. If you want a great example, watch two cats interact. You will see one or both of them timing out on a regular basis.

***If they start hitting you, you’re probably doing this right. Or wrong. It’s all the same. Dada is the anti dada.

****Timing is probably different for each listener as well, but I haven’t studied that in as much depth.

*****I’m sure someone has studied this, but I can’t find a link.

******Incidentally, I quite enjoy the feeling of ‘cache miss‘/’branch misprediction‘ that I get when someone uses a word I don’t expect. It jumbles my neural net and makes me think.