What do you get when you combine a joke with a rhetorical question?

The structure of a pun includes a hidden message, something for the hearer to decode. “Text can be analysed in the light of other information... The type of knowledge [puns] disclose is not hidden, or rather, it is an open secret, that disavows itself as soon as it declares itself legible- you both mean it and you don’t” (Jordan 2021, 531, 543). The pun inherently means two things, and the double meaning is what causes it to be funny. "The understanding of the double meaning of a pun seems to be linked to the hearer’s level of understanding and trust in the punster. Too much or too little trust will cause the joke to “fall flat”, but a Goldilocks level of trust is what Cruz refers to as (Cruz 2015, 17)."

There is a fine line between a successful pun and a joke that is either too encoded and cannot be decoded or understood, or telling a pun to people who do not have the background knowledge to decode it. Much like the Newfoundland Christmas mumming, as defined by Don Handelman in his 1984 article Inside Out, Outside In: Concealment and Revelation in Newfoundland Christmas Mumming, there are two critical points in this structure of folklore: the concealment or encoding, and revelation or decoding. Without success in both of these points the the performance is rendered mute.

Even though the hearer may understand the joke, and even find humor in it, they groan, because society hates them. “In some contexts the use of a pun is enough to convict one of the fallacy of equivocation, and even where “simply” fun, we refuse to laugh. By groaning, we punish the punster. Apparently we take puns more seriously than we consistently insist” (Jordan 2021, 532). The tension arises from the possibility that the hearer may misinterpret the joke because “[…] as pointed out by Guy Cook: ‘in the pun, the relation of language and reality seems inverted.’[…] Via their refusal to commit to a single meaning of any particular formulation they have a flirtatious, needling power” (Jordan 2021, 533).

The Insider Versus the Outsider

Because the audience must decode a message to understand the humor in a pun, the hearer must have at least some level of background information on the subject(s) in order to understand the joke. “The success of this joke depends on how familiar both participants are with the structure of this type of joke” (Sims and Stephens 2011, 187). Puns create an esoteric/exoteric atmosphere between the punster/audience and those who do not share the same background knowledge. The listener who understands the pun has inside knowledge, therefore they are an insider, and the punster and listener engage in an inside joke.“[T]heir relation to secret and encoded knowledge, latent significance, and the narrative proliferation of redundant information or description” (Jordan 2021, 534) creates an esoteric relationship.

The punster can alienate a population based on a failed attempt at punning. “…puns both cultivate and repel the reader’s desire for meaning, in a way that seems impervious to interaction: the reader slides off the surface of them to the next one, unable to make anything of them, uncomfortably aware that looking for meaning might mean missing the point" (Jordan 2021, 530). Having no background information to both subjects of the pun, the listener may not even understand that a joke exists. “Without the capacity for communicating meanings as understood by a community of speakers, a sign cannot be linguistically relevant. By necessity, the sign is arbitrary, meaning there is no “natural” connection between the signifier and the signified” (Erickson and Murphy 2017, 61).