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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/23752
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/23752
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

> Although, I totally understand that experienced ones... do not spend hours thinking up a new pun.

How do you know that?

Skills take time and practice. Maybe the good writers _do_ spend hours working on puns.

If you want to practice at wordplay, you need to think about the meanings of words, and how they can be looked at obliquely. One exercise I did in high school was to take a list of common clichés and idioms and turn them into questions. For example:

- Where do you buy elbow grease? Does it work better than knee grease? Does it come in cans or squeeze tubes?
- Would a durian fruit by any other name still smell like a four-week-old diaper?
- If a doctor's spouse bought an apple farm, would that be automatic grounds for divorce?
- What if I'm only happy as an oyster? or a shrimp?

and so on. If you do enough of these, it allows you to crack open the language to get at the meanings, and come back through the meanings to choose another word which creates the pun.

- If a pun is the lowest form of wit, is a bun the lowest form of wheat?
- There was a man who entered a local newspaper's pun contest. He sent in ten different puns, in the hope that at least one of the puns would win. Unfortunately, no pun in ten did.

Original score: 3