Quote:

Is an esce chat a logical thing to have here?



Shouldn't a pun play on words by exploiting two or more different possible meanings of a word or phrase to give the sentence a double meaning?

> Is an esce chat a logical thing to have here?

The face value of the sentence makes sense. But the intended quibble on "esce chat a logical" ("eschatological") gives us:

> Is an eschatological thing to have here?

which is a nonsense sentence—and hence the sentence doesn't have a double meaning: It just has one meaning, and three consecutive words which happen to sound similar to another word, but this other word has no meaningful bearing on the initial meaning.

(Or else it does, in which case, you will explain it and I will say "I'm a stupid face" three times fast).

> The owl watching convention was a hoot!

To me, this is an example of a pun proper because both meanings of "hoot" are meaningful (but not grammatical) in the context.

A pun isn't just any instance of homophony or polysemy, is it, or else this sentence would also contain a pun, because "or" also means "gold" in heraldry? What I'm asking is—Doesn't the second meaning of the double meaning of a pun have to have something to do with the first meaning?

By the way, I'm not attacking Ted's puns. I normally enjoy them. I just wanted to raise the question of what actually constitutes a pun.

Your thoughts.