Recount Puns

One time he told me how he hiked in the mountains, sat on a rock, and wondered all night where the sun had gone...

...and then it dawned on him.

That would really be an unpresidented event.

"Looking back, it's all kind of blurry."

It was a discount viscount recount.

"Doctor, could you write a note for my wife letting her know my head isn't up there?"

Laugh I thought I'd die,
Die, they'd bury me.
Bury me, there's worms,
Worms, they tickle.
Laugh, I thought I'd die.

"Greetings, comrade." says the spy, but before he could finish his sentence, the Russian says, "I think you are American spy."

The spy is alarmed, but being a skilled, trained, spy, he says, "That is not true! I am the proudest Soviet there is! I can sing the anthem more beautifully than any other man in the country!"

He then proceeds to sing the Soviet anthem, so melodically and beautifully, that everybody in the bar cheers.

"Very good, very good!" says the politician. "But I still think you are spy."

The man continues to keep his cool.

"I am a historian! I can tell you everything about this glorious country!"

He then spends about two hours recounting the Revolution, the Great Patriotic War, about how superior to the Russia is in terms of technology compared to America and makes a great argument about how communism is beneficial to society.

"Amazing! You are skilled!" says the politician.

The spy smirks.

"But I still think you American spy."

The spy is getting frustrated, but still unfazed.

He replies, "I am good drinker, a true Russian! Let us drink, and see who can come out top!"

The bar turns its attention to the politician and the spy, who are now in a drinking contest.

The bartender serves drink after drink of vodka.

After about an hour of drinking, the politician nearly passes out, unable to hold as much liquor as the spy, to a resounding cheer amongst the bar.

In the midst of the cheering, the Russian politician gets up, smiling, and in a slurred speech, repeats, "You are good, you are good... but I still think you are spy."

The American spy, piss drunk, loses his skill and gives up.

"Okay, you got me. I am an American. But what made you think that way, after all this time?"

The Russian politician replies, "There aren't many black people in Russia."

My dad just recounted me this lovely tale.

My dad's been a bit sick, this morning he went to open his phone and accidentally held the button down too long because he was coughing, then this happened:

Dad: cough blurgh cough

Siri: I'm sorry, I didn't catch that

Dad: of course not, Phone's can't get sick.

Note: Quality Very Varying (I see what I did there) and sometimes subject to specialist knowledge. So I apologise in advance. Shame me with your better puns.

While I was languishing in the Language Centre, doing some semantics antics and considering how all the other linguistics students despised and derided me, I was accosted by a stout man with large glasses who made me a preposition. It was that I should collect terrible puns, to do with linguistics, in order to ingratiate myself yet further with the other linguistics students (including even the phonetics fanatics).

I'm struggling to think of a pun to do with grammaticality that both makes sense and "Is grandma tickly?" correct. I'm also stuck on 'morphologician'. (I'm not actually sure that's a particularly logical word for the subject, though I guess that's more for, er, more for a logician to worry about.)

The problem I have with writing about phonological variation is that one is constantly forced to choose between being fun or logical - very Asian!I always get in trouble with electricians, they think I'm calling them a 'dialectician' whereas in fact I'm just saying "Die, electrician."

I like pscycholinguistics – the only department of linguistics where it’s acceptable to wear a cycle helmet. My Australian accent is terrible but I like to think my Sath Efrican one is predicate. My favourite accent is Received Pronunciation, because it is the accent chiefly used by invisible Japanese people who are ordered online. When the first recipient of an invisible Japanese person got the parcel, they wrote a complaint saying "Received but can't see Asian" and the name stuck.

Why did the speakers whose native languages weren't English, but whose only shared language was English, but they weren't very good at it and kept on having to stop to think about it, stop talking to one another? They came to an agreement. (Get it? If not, write your answer on a pastecard and paste it to the below address.)

What did the 'a' say to the 'the'? "You definitely are ticklish, 'the'!"

Why was the small man eaten by the large bear, which was proportionately bigger than him? It had, er, relative claws.

I think the reason there are so many speakers of Russian is because they all partake in an activity called "copulae shun". (Ok, ok, I know, that was Pushkin it.)

I know a man called Hillary who can, might, should, did, must, shall and will ride an ox. We call him "Ox Hillary".

I always think the verb 'to be' in the senten

My dad is so proud of his dad jokes, he recounts them in emails to my sister and me. Oh, Dad.

My grandparents on my dad's side would always have my brother and I over for Christmas when we were younger (around when I was 5-10 and my brother was 9-14). They always had a little tree in addition to their big one. The small tree had a bunch of those stereotypical ornaments (round, plain, solid color) in a bunch of different colors. My brother and I would always have fun counting the number of a specific color of ornament separately, then comparing our answers. However, every time we would, we would get different answers, so we'd recount, then get different answers again!

Anyway, just this last year (me being 18, my brother being 22), we reminded our grandfather of this. He laughed, said he remembered it, then said "well, why don't you count up the red ones again, see what you get? I'll tell you if you're right."

We agreed, and got to it. We each counted 3 times separately, then compared, then decided to average them. We got around 24 for the red ones, so went to tell our grandpa. After saying we weren't sure, we asked how many there were. He laughed and said "Darn, I don't know! I was hoping you guys could get a number so I wouldn't have to!"

Not that funny when retold, but it was hilarious then

A couple years ago, an employee of ours, when she was in college, was using her MacBook in a tree. The laptop fell off her lap, to the ground, and the screen was shattered.

This story was recounted yesterday and I added: "Looks like the apple didn't fall far from the tree".

A couple laughs, many groans, but mostly "oh gosh..."

Okay so where I stay it is unbelievably hot at the moment. We're already on the third heatwave of this summer so far. I came home one afternoon from work to find my roommate sitting at the island counter of the kitchen working on his laptop. He had all the windows and doors wide open and said it was way too hot to work in his room. So later, while I was visiting my parents for dinner, the discussion of the weather came up and I recounted the story with my roomate. My dad got that twinkle in his eyes and said: “Well, I guess if you can’t stand the heat, get into the kitchen.”