Your Life Is a Lie — Puns Are Terrible

ATTN: Anyone who likes puns

(Photo by Mwabonje from Pexels)

If puns were music, they’d be the macarena. If puns were a day, they’d be Second Monday. If they were food, they’d look like candy and taste like prunes. If they were a leisurely weekend, they’d spring yard work on your Saturday and paint your Sunday with pointless e-mails.

Puns are like that teenager on TikTok you can’t strangle. They’re step-by-step instructions that keep changing and build nothing. If puns were a reality show, they’d be an unholy mess of excess spray tans and ugly hook ups — and still no one would get chlamydia.

Puns are the Spectrum cable and internet of wordplay. They’re like tying a sweater around your waist and around your shoulders. If puns were at a sporting event, they would always root for whatever team was winning. If they were cheerleaders, they’d think guys want to date them for their personalities. Puns chew bubble gum and forget to walk.

In ancient times, a technologically advanced alien civilization built the pyramids, and then abandoned us on hearing their first pun. In the 1950s, lobotomies were common practice in psychiatric hospitals, and still remain an effective treatment for puns. Today, artificial intelligence chooses non-sentience, because we live in a world with puns.

Puns are like cracked screens on cell phones covered in hundred-dollar cases. They listen to podcasts where three hosts talk and laugh at the same time on the subway without headphones. They’re like listening to a vegan talk about their beliefs, and everyone is rapt with attention.

A pun is waking up in the middle of the night, having to get water, but then deciding to just lay there, mixing your Sahara mouth with morning breath. A pun is the tension in your bladder reminding you that you have to pee, but you can’t pee for at least a few decades.

Originally, Mortal Kombat had each character share their favorite pun at the end of a match. Puns believe Han was acting in self-defense, and Mufasa was probably going to fall anyway. A pun won’t share its streaming passwords with you, but you don’t find that out until you realize it gave you the wrong password.

Puns lock you out of your car while it’s running. If you asked a pun to hit the snooze button, it would break it instead. If a pun was your plus one at a wedding, it would show up in white pants and ask everyone to sit in its lap. Puns promise the benefits of meditation and then deliver the results of actually trying meditation. A pun expects you to come to its art show and listen to its poetry.

Puns are the chastity belt of thoughts. A pun’s only friend is the pope, and even he forgets to pray for them. If Jesus were a pun, he would have turned wine into water and used it to nurture a fake potted plant. Puns are offensive to people holding up pictures of dead babies outside Planned Parenthood.

Puns are the tombstones that make you wish you had started smoking in high school. If I had a gun with two bullets, and I was stuck in a room with Hitler, Bin Laden, and a pun, I would shoot myself twice and leave the pun a bottle of vitamins.

The term ‘Indian giver’ was a pun in its first draft. In fact, whenever you have a vaguely racist thought, a pun probably pushed your subconscious to go there. The wind in the sails of the transatlantic slave trade were puns. Separate but equal is a legal doctrine that was mentored by a pun.

A pun will tell a child there is no tooth fairy and the monster in their closet can see you hiding under the sheets. If a pun were getting divorced, it would still insist the kids only have one Christmas. Every chaperone at every middle school dance loves puns. A pun walks into a bar, and nobody gets laid.

Puns are like a dinner bell that invite you to the table, but when you get there, instead of food, there’s a giant cockroach wearing a suicide vest. He tells you he ate all the dessert, and then blows his roach juice in your face.

Jeffrey Epstein didn’t kill himself. A pun did.

Puns are like harmonicas filled with pints of room temperature spit. Listening to a pun is like squeezing lemon juice in your paper cut. Telling a pun is like dipping a baby’s pacifier in hot sauce and then taping it shut in their mouth.

Puns hog the arm rest and spend the entire ride whispering their texts out loud. A pun will work up a sweat, walk into your powder room, and give you a full-bodied hug. A pun will reply all to a company e-mail just to say, “Ok, thanks.”

Puns believe negative zero is a number. Alan Dershowitz believes puns are unimpeachable.

A pun will wait until it’s at the front of the line before it reads the menu.

Puns take videos of fireworks.

If you’re out of toilet paper in the bathroom, just use a pun.

The suicide hotline will hang up on you if you tell them a pun.

I hate pun.

Fuck puns.