"Get Thee to a Punnery!"

"Get thee to a nunnery!" - Hamlet, the Dane

"Get thee to a punnery!" - Omelette, the Egg 

"Abandon all hope, you who enter" - Dante,The Inferno
"A good pun is its own re-word" - Fred, the Herring

On this page:

• Today's Subject Is Occupations
• Philosophical Flotsam
• Dictionary of Randumb Puns
• A Little Two-bit Humor and some Musician Jokes
• Last Gaspé:  French Toast 

[Read and weep... or, if you're a farmer, weed and reap --ed.]

Girl:  My father is a college professor....  He is a fount of all knowledge.
Boy:  My father is a printer....  He has a knowledge of all fonts!

And speaking of occupations, when Fred Herring was in grade school, he assumed he was going to be an astronaut, because his teachers kept telling him he was taking up space.  Although he never followed that advice or career path, now with the commercialization of space exploration, Fred can finally say with certainty, "There's no such thing as a free launch."

Historically, occupations change, as does our philosophical approach to them.  During the 80-year existence of the Soviet Union, your typical Marxist-Leninist sought to make a living from the "sweat of the working class," while today, your typical Russian entrepeneur is more like Fred's uncle on his mother's side, a Groucho-Marxist comedian who sought to make his living off the "sweat of the leisure class."  Only within the last half of the 20th century, did that become a real possibility with the advent of personal trainers. 

Fred's father was a police detective.  Ironically, his most memorable case involved the murder of his brother-in-law, the aforementioned comedian, who had been performing at a local nightclub as a sit-down comic; his audience kept shouting for him to "sit down and shut up!" while the odd lawyer in the crowd would add, "You have the right to remain silent!"  Early one morning following a particularly pun-ishing performance, his body was found in a ditch in the city zoo, covered with groucho marks.  Detective Herring chased a red herring himself for some time trying to come up with a motive that involved zoo animals and William Henry Harrison.  Seems that at the crime scene he had spotted a large grout-encrusted African bison, which he immediately categorized as "your typical gnu and tiler, too."  Eventually, after hearing a recording of the previous night's performance, he arrested the real culprits, the entire audience. 

In the sensational trial that followed, the prosecutor played the tape, and in typical Perry Mason fashion, the accused to a man and woman sprang to their feet, blurted out their admissions of guilt, and threw themselves on the mercy of the court.  Subsequently, they were all acquitted when a verdict of justifiable homicide was rendered.  [If you're starting to feel the same way about this article, you should stop reading immediately - ed.]  Media coverage of this case lead to a new entry in the lexicon:  Just as killing someone is homicide and killing oneself is suicide, we now call killing a comedian all-kidding-aside.

[For more on Fred Herring's career, see The Fred Herring Story.  - ed.]

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"Cream rises, but so does pond scum" --Fred Herring

First, some definitions:

• Flotsam:  Floating wreckage of a ship or its cargo 
• Jetsam:  Part of a ship, its equipment or cargo that is cast overboard to lighten the load in time of distress that sinks or is washed ashore 
• Winsome:  Generally pleasing and engaging often because of a childlike innocence 
• Losesome:  The opposite of winsome, as in "winsome, losesome"

Teacher:  Can anyone tell me who wrote Critique of Pure Reason?

Student:  I. Kant?

Teacher:  Can anyone else?

[For the philosophy impaired, Immanuel Kant was the author; for the humor impaired, forget it. - ed.]

Rene Descartes walked into a bar and ordered a martini. After he drank it, the bartender asked him if he'd like another.  

"I think not," he replied and immediately disappeared.

[I was attempting to explain this joke to a neighbor who was engaged in training a yearling colt. He accused me of "putting Descartes before de horse." - Fred]

Then, there's what the Zen master said to the hot dog vendor, "Make me one with everything."

And maybe you missed these old chestnuts:

• "God is dead" - Nietzsche;  
• "Nietzsche is dead" - God 

• "To do is to be" - Descarte
• "To be is to do" – Sartre
• "Dooby dooby do" – Sinatra

Apparently, Socrates and his accusers didn't have a Platonic relationship.

[Who's this "Ed" guy and why does he keep interrupting? - Fred]

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[If you think these are bad, think about the ones we didn't use! - ed.]

Mid-brain crisis (as in "He's having a..."):  When your left brain doesn't know what your right brain is doing; synonym:  mentalpause

Media-crity:  The current state of movies, radio, and television

["When the bottom line is profit, only bottom feeders profit in the end." - Fred Herring]

Urine test:  Something you can pass and fail at the same time

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Do you know what kind of horse this is on the back of the Delaware quarter?

If you need more time to think, keep clicking here (or you can just answer whenever you're ready).

Click here to see the answer.

OK, after that this next one should be obvious.  What kind of horse is this on the back of the Kentucky quarter?

Click here to see the answer.

And speaking of a little (very little) musical humor, Mozart once asked a friend to suggest a name for his latest composition.  The friend replied, "I don't think I can help you, Wolfgang.  I'm inclined to knock music!"

Or consider what Beethoven's mother said when he told her that she was the source of all his inspiration:  "HA-HA-HA HAA!"

Or as Pogo or one of his Okefenokee Swamp friends used to say, "You have to set a turian to Khachaturian."

They originally asked Bach to compose The Messiah, but he didn't think he could handle it. 

2019 addition:  

"Harry, is that Offenbach on the radio?"

"Actually, Tom, more often than not, it's Beethoven."

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"Verbosity unparalleled, paragraphs replete with run-on, run-out, run-dry rambling reconstructions of randomly requisite ruminations ruinously writhing in raucous riots of rotting, rattletrap, tongue-tripping, time worn, wearisome, warped, warted artifice, artlessly adorned with atrophied alliteration!"

"What was so punny about that?"

"No pun intended, or entended, as the French might say, or as they might say about breakfast, 'To make an umlaut, you have to break some aigus.' "

"I thought they might say, 'Un oeuf is enough!' "

"You can say that again...  but don't!"

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Return to One and One Half Wits Dot Com. 

["Return to sender" after those puns!  Or as the kids are fond of saying, "That was two-thirds of a pun:  U-N"...  or something like that. - ed.]