Only the Brave Puns

It was ruled by a fair king who joyfully ruled his land. Unfortunately, the kingdom was also home to a wicked thief who loved nothing more than causing mayhem for all the inhabitants of the land.

However, the thief was not your ordinary thief. He only stole bells. Any kind of bell, whether a tiny bell from a kitten’s collar, all the way up to the bell from the king’s royal bell tower.

When the king awoke one morning, the bell tower’s bell was missing. The king, being brave and noble, decided to follow the thief back to his lair. He chose four of his most loyal soldiers, mounted his horse, and rode off into the snowy woods, following the footprints left behind on the ground.

Soon, he and his soldiers arrived to a clearing in the woods. In front of them was a large, bell-shaped building. They found the thief’s lair!Pointing to the recent tracks left in the snow by the thief, the king announced to the soldiers,

“Look! The Fresh Prints to Bell Lair!”

Three brothers are trick or treating near a shady house. Suddenly, a spider appears on the first brothers arm causing him to scream in shock. This causes the second brother to run away in fear only to get hit over the head by a dead tree branch. The third brother tries to escape but trips over a coffin. Filled with fright, the three brothers decide to go back home before they are stopped by a ghost that informs them, “The items you have encountered today will kill you in exactly 20 years.” and vanishes into thin air. Understandably, the three brothers were terrified out of their wits and ran back to their house.

20 years later on Halloween, the first brother has booby trapped and spider-proofed his entire house. Unfortunately, he accidently runs into a wall causing a black widow to fall on his arm and killing him.

The second brother has prepared for many years and made sure that he was nowhere near any trees. However, he somehow miscalculated by one day and was killed when a lightning bolt struck a tree causing it to fall and crush him.

The third brother completely forgot about the ghost’s warning and was having dinner with his wife. His allergies were really acting up that night, so he decided to go to a pharmacy to purchase some allergy medicine. Suddenly, without any warning, the entire store goes dark and a giant coffin appears in front of him, opens up, and starts moving towards him. Remembering his frightful Halloween over 20 years ago, the brother starts desperately throwing everything in sight towards the coffin but to no avail. Now there is nothing else left other than a lone bottle of NyQuil. In one last brave attempt, the brother throws the bottle of NyQuil at the coffin and it miraculously vanishes.

Because NyQuil keeps the coffin’ away.

In the not too distant future, web censorship is pervasive; speech and freedom are strangers to one another; while pirates sail the seas with impunity, digital pirates are incarcerated by the busload.

Anyone who speaks out against this ban on open-dialogue or the free-sharing-of-ideas is ground down and hidden away, and the resistance is loosing its will.

A small group of contributors to reddit, huddled together in a bunker beneath barely-waving flags of Snoo, worked tirelessly to repost new ideas from around the internet, to release ideas from their chains, and make speech free ... again!

But it was not to be - a gang of the governments anti-piracy enforcers descended on this, the last bastion of humankind's will to share-freely. Arriving in an armored bus, ten shock-troopers breached the bunker and it looked like the day was lost.

Fortunately for us all, one brave redditor led the collective out a back entrance and they circled to the driveway. This leader told the other redditors to wait in the bushes while he overpowered the one soldier left guarding the transport. There was a flash of movement, a crack from a fallen branch as it struck the guard, and then, stolen keys in hand, the hero revved the engine and told the redditors to pile in.

He had to will himself ignore the gas gauge as he floored the accelerator on the 25,000 pound ticket to freedom - there was only survival or defeat, and nothing in between. Sirens came alive behind him as he rushed for the border to the promised land, to the Free-North.

As the engine begins to cough, the titanic weight of the transport cleaves the barricades asunder and the pursuing vehichles have to hard-brake to avoid skidding beyond their corrupt jurisdiction. Both exhausted and elated, the redditors follow their hero to the freedom promised by their new surroundings ... but their peril is not yet passed.

Though most of the pirate-hunters glower from the south-side of the border, one special agent has crossed over and is speaking with the border guards. The tension is thick. A long-faced guard turns to the newcomers, clearly troubled by what he must do.

"Folks," he says, a pained look on his kindly face, "I'm sorry, to do this, don't cha' know, but I got no choice, eh!"

Confused, the redditors look to one another, and tremble as they notice the agent's smug expression, greedy eyes fixed on the leader of the exodus.

"Look here, now, you are all welcome here, of course, and since speech is free here, we are

I have written this book to sweep away all misunderstandings about the crafty art of punnery and to convince you that the pun is well worth celebrating.... After all, the pun is mightier than the sword, and these days you are much more likely to run into a pun than into a sword. [A pun is a witticism involving the playful use of a word in different senses, or of words which differ in meaning but sound alike.]

Scoffing at puns seems to be a conditioned reflex, and through the centuries a steady barrage of libel and slander has been aimed at the practice of punning. Nearly three hundred years ago John Dennis sneered, “A pun is the lowest form of wit,” a charge that has been butted and rebutted by a mighty line of pundits and punheads.

Henry Erskine, for example, has protested that if a pun is the lowest form of wit, “It is, therefore, the foundation of all wit.” Oscar Levant has added a tag line: “A pun is the lowest form of humor—when you don’t think of it first.” John Crosbie and Bob Davies have responded to Dennis with hot, cross puns: “...If someone complains that punning is the lowest form of humor you can tell them that poetry is verse.”

Samuel Johnson, the eighteenth century self-appointed custodian of the English language, once thundered, “To trifle with the vocabulary which is the vehicle of social intercourse is to tamper with the currency of human intelligence. He who would violate the sanctities of his mother tongue would invade the recesses of the national till without remorse... ”

Joseph Addison pronounced that the seeds of punning are in the minds of all men, and tho’ they may be subdued by reason, reflection, and good sense, they will be very apt to shoot up in the greatest genius, that which is not broken and cultivated by the rules of art.

Far from being invertebrate, the inveterate punster is a brave entertainer. He or she loves to create a three-ring circus of words: words clowning, words teetering on tightropes, words swinging from tent tops, words thrusting their head into the mouths of lions. Punnery can be highly entertaining, but it is always a risky business. The humor can fall on its face, it can lose its balance and plunge into the sawdust, or it can be decapitated by the snapping shut of jaws. While circus performers often receive laughter or applause for their efforts, punsters often draw an obligatory groan for theirs. But the fact that most people groan at, rather than laugh at, puns doesn’t mean that the punnery isn’t fu