Icon from a picrew by grgikau. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. The X-Files. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
The second best pun I’ve ever encountered in the wild was when I was walking down the street in a “hip” part of Seattle and saw a couple of Budweiser cans thrown into a bush. And I said to a random stranger walking nearby “damn, the local beer harvest is really poor this year”. And the random stranger responded “give it time, they’re only buds”.
So…what was the first best pun?
Somehow this thing got 1k notes while the previous post, which was about the best pun I’ve ever encountered in the wild got 3 notes. Anyway: I was TAing an electrostatics lab. The experiment was to see what happens when you rub wool on a bunch of rods of different materials and then bring the rods near scraps of paper.
One student’s lab report had this observation on what happens when you try to charge up a metal rod: “paper remains stationery”
Not math, but I just laughed at this until I cried while my best friend was teaching his calculus section. Still not sure why they let me be a faculty member.
One time in grade school, I was sitting around minding my own business, when some other kid walked up to me. I don’t remember anything about this kid– name, gender, anything. I only remember what happened next.
The kid said, “I won a pig.”
I didn’t have any context for this. I didn’t know this kid, and our school was in the city. It’s not like there were any contests going around where the prize was a pig. Not that I knew of, anyway. And if there were, why would it be any of my business? My mind didn’t really know what to do with this information.
So my mind did what it always does when it can’t think of anything else to do. It made a really pitifully horrible pun.
I said, “I TWO a pig.”
And the other kid went along with this, and said, “I three a pig.”
And we kept going, four a pig, five a pig, and so on–
–all the way until the other kid says “I seven a pig,” and I answer, “I eight a pig.”
And then I realize this was all a setup– one of those elaborate grade school jokes where you try to get someone to say something rude or embarrassing like “liquor and rubber buns” or “ICUP.” Yeah, very funny. I ate a pig.
And it wasn’t till years later that I realized how much of a leap of faith this kid took. They walked up to me with NO context and said “I won a pig,” just TRUSTING that I would carry the joke all the way to its natural conclusion.
Did they somehow know my pun-obsessed mind well enough to predict that I would make that specific pun on “won” and “one”? Even though I didn’t have any idea who they were?
Or did they actually forget that you’re supposed to explain the rules of the joke first (“okay, you repeat what I said, but with the next number!”) and did they just happen to get incredibly lucky?
Or maybe they actually freaking won a pig, and were just trying to tell me about it, and when I made a pun they just decided to run with it, and it was sheer coincidence that it just accidentally turned into a joke.
I want to find this kid, someday, and ask what the crap was going on. Too bad I have no idea who they were.
