Puns and other elaborate wordplays stop conversations cold. Puns seldom add levity to conversations, but they almost always add awkwardness.
Wordplay and puns, like “Shanks for the memories,” “The Big Crapple,” and “To Glee or not to Glee, that is the question” may sound funny in your head, but when wordplay hits a conversation, the result is almost always awkwardness and hesitation—not laughter—for two reasons.
First, and foremost, puns and wordplays are confusing. It takes time for people to understand that you are punning, and this inserts an awkward pause into the conversation while your conversational partner tries to figure out what you mean. Even when people do understand immediately that you are making a play on words, they can still fail to understand it, so you are left with the awkwardness of someone trying to laugh alone with a joke that they don’t get.
Second, wordplay and puns seal off a conversational train of thought completely—there is nothing you can really say in response to a pun. How do you follow-up a pun about Shakespeare or line like “Shanks for the memories?” You don’t, and this breaks the conversation’s momentum abruptly and leads to an awkward scramble to get it going again.
Don’t believe that puns and wordplay kills conversations? Try this experiment: The next time you hear a pun or wordplay in conversation, watch what happens. Puns seldom generate honest laughter, but they will give you awkwardness and nervous laughter as your conversational partner tries to get the conversation back on track. Look for a pun and you’ll usually see an awkward, jerky conversation right on its heels.
You and a couple of your friends might love trade puns. Have at it, but please leave the rest of us alone. We want to talk to you, but your wordplay is making it difficult. You are throwing up walls in the conversation that we have to scale over. As you might like to say, your wordplay is a wea-pun of conversational destruction.