A pun is a play on words that either uses words that have multiple meanings or replaces a word that has the same or similar sound to provide a funny, (or in this case) “punny” or catchy effect. Puns are versatile and can be used in informal conversations, jokes, social media, and even for marketing campaigns.
In informal conversations they are usually made when jokes are being thrown around. Some of them may even fall under the category of “dad jokes''. These are jokes that usually make fun of even the most redundant things that are seen as silly or childish. A few examples of these are, “The golfer brought an extra pair of pants to the course in case he got a hole-in-one,” or “This picture of a field of wheat is a little grainy.” The cheesiness of these puns is what makes them funny to some and painstaking to others.
In the context of social media, puns are most commonly used in memes or in captions for instagram posts. People use them because they are catchy enough to make a viewer chuckle and then maybe even like the post because of that. For example, if somebody posts a picture of them and their spouse on a coffee date they may caption the photo, “Words cannot expresso my love for you.” The word expresso is in place of express and it becomes an effective caption. Early meme formats were very much puns with an image attached to it and now puns are used in memes that mimic the older ones on purpose.
For Marketing, companies use puns in order to draw the customer in with a cheesy joke and to give the business the image of being an ordinary person by having the human quality of humor instead of being strictly business and serious at all times. You will see them on advertisements or social media pages for an organization. A great pun used by the Dollar Shave club is, “Shave time, Shave Money.” They’re saying that using their razors will save you time and money. Sports organizations also love to utilize puns for their marketing efforts. A good example of this is a tweet by The Washington Nationals baseball club, they tweeted a photo of a pitcher’s hand throwing a baseball and asked their audience to, “give them a hand.” The audience “gave them a hand,” by replying to the tweet. It was a pun used as a call-to-action.
Puns are effective in informal settings, but are not recommended for anything formal or when speaking to somebody who isn’t very fluent in English language. To understand a pun you need context or awareness of phonetics or multiple definitions. The easiest puns to understand are the simple ones that don’t require a lot of context like, “these egg jokes crack me up!” Next time you go on the internet, go out and see how often you see any puns!