Greeting Card Campaign: 11-8 Abet and Aid Punsters Day

Click here to download your
Aid and Abet a Punster Day card.

Today is National Abet and Aid Punsters Day. Puns are the most widely disrespected form of humor. Alexander Pope said, "He that would pun would pick a pocket." Such literary luminaries such as Henry David Thoreau have been fond of puns and word play. William Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde and comedians like George Carlin used puns extensively. The Roman playwright Plautus used to make up puns in Latin.

Most punsters can't help themselves. Any time there's an opportunity to turn an innocent and unsuspecting phrase into a painful and tortured pun. On Abet and Aid Punsters Day a group called Punsters Unlimited encourages punsters and on this, their special day, they urge people to unclench a bit and go ahead and laugh at puns.  If you're interested, you can even subscribe to the Pun of the Day and join in the fun. Punning, also called paronomasia, is a form of word play that suggests two or more meanings, using multiple meanings of words, or similar-sounding words with the intent to make you laugh.

This pun is famous since it manages to pull off a quintuple pun -very difficult to do.


One cutting edge aquarium saved a lot of money when its owner discovered a means to make the dolphins live forever -- since the dolphins never died, no money needed to be spent on buying new ones. Extending the dolphins' lives required putting a special mixture into their food; one of the ingredients was baby sea gull meat. So one day, one of the workers was sent to the beach to find some. On the way back, baby sea gulls in hand, he had to pass through a forest. In the middle of the path was a sleeping lion. He very carefully stepped over it, only to be handcuffed by a policeman.

"Officer," he said, "what's going on?"

"You're under arrest," said the policeman.

"But why?" he asked.

The policeman replied, "For transporting young gulls across a sedate lion for immortal porpoises."

Send your wife a gratuitous pun and a free downloadable Abet and Aid Punsters Day card to let her know that she is the apple of his eye and that you love to sit down be cider.  Just click on the caption below the picture of the punster pooch.  The link will take you to a pdf file in Google Docs.  Download the file. Don't try to print the file from within Google Docs. I use a lot of fonts and Google Docs doesn't seem to like them very much.  Instead, click on "File" in the upper left corner, then select "download" and copy the file to your own computer. Open it with Adobe PDF Reader or whatever PDF reader you prefer.  Print the card from there and it should be fine.

This is a side fold card, so when you print it, be sure to select "landscape" and if you have two-sided printing, choose "flip on the short side" so that the inside of the card is the same way up as the outside. See if you can come up with a pun of your own to write inside your card. You might try puns and love in a Google Search.

© 2013 by Tom King