Self Involved Puns

Starting on the 1st of December and running until the 10th, /r/dadjokes will be self-post only. This 10 day trial is being conducted to measure the overall effect on post quality. We hope to see a reduction in posts that exist purely for karma-gaming, and an increase in posts that represent our favourite dad jokes and stories.

This is not a ban on images. You may still link to pictures within your self-post - but you will no longer receive karma for doing so. Also as a suggestion try and be witty about it, don't just post pictures as the only content in the post. If there is a story behind it (involving your dad or anyones dad) then give that more of a preference and use the picture as a supporting arm for the joke, remember to be nice and the punnier the better.

As always, we're open to hearing your thoughts on the matter - and this thread will be stickied for the 10 days so that you can pop in and let us know how you feel the trial is going.

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