I have a pa-knack-he for puns.

They are the go-to tools in my arsenal when I want to post a funny comment. I also look forward to reading the creative puns conjured up by other users when I’m browsing Reddit and Twitter.

Reading a good pun fills me with incredible joy because I understand the creativity and knowledge that is needed to come up with one. It is also why I appreciate those who can make good puns.

Reading as many puns as possible helps me hone my own technique for creating them.

I try my best to come up with puns every chance I get. When I read a meme or post that warrants a funny reply, my first instinct is to figure out if my comment can be a pun.

But How Do I Make Puns On Demand?

When you ask people online how they come up with puns, they just say that you have to increase your vocabulary, be good at word associations, homonyms, homophones, just practice, etc.

For many, the skill just comes naturally, like a reflex they can’t stop.

Rarely do you get a step-by-step method, that you can use to create puns, that works.

So, as someone who loves puns, over time, I have developed my own system for making them that anybody can start using right now!

Of course, you need time to get good at it and it will still fail in many cases where a good pun is not possible at all. You also need a good vocabulary, but that is just one part of the equation.

So, let’s begin.

My Technique — The Bucket

The first component of a good pun is identifying the core concept that is being punned.

For this, I’m going to choose a random word — bagel.

Now, I understand that there is no way for you to verify this, but I swear on everyone I love that I picked this word randomly, without forethought, and stuck with it throughout the article.

If you want to make a pun based on bagels, start by mentally going through all the words that you can associate with a bagel. They can be

1. Synonyms
2. Constituent objects
3. Properties of the object
4. Other similar (but not exactly) objects
5. References to the object in the real world.

   Since it is hard to find a good synonym for “bagel,” we will just go further down the list.

   For things that constitute a bagel, we can have bread, crust, yeast, sesame, flour, hole, etc.

   For properties of the object, we can come up with words like fresh, soft, fluffy, creamy, hard, sweet, savory, stale, chalky, moldy, chewy, doughy, unseasoned, etc.

   Then we have many objects which are loosely similar to bagels such as bread rolls, buns, doughnuts, sandwiches, etc.

   Finally, references to bagels in the real world can be something like store-bought, plain, cheap, everything, Asiago, off-the-shelf, etc.

   These words form the bucket that we have to pick from to make our pun.

Ok, I Have The Bucket, Now What?

Now, our task here is to combine two words from this bucket together in a way that vaguely makes phonetic as well as linguistic sense.

Here is where the concept of homophones and homonyms comes into play. Ideally, you’d want to find two concepts from each set which are either homophones or homonyms of each other.

If thinking in terms of homophones or homonyms is too complicated, think of simple syllables.

Break up the words in the bucket into individual syllables. Then, find the syllables that match up either exactly or flow into each other.

Finally, once you find a match, merge the concepts together by replacing one syllable with the other or combining them.

For example, from the bucket, roll and mold, have the same sounding syllables and could have been a combination if it made linguistic sense.

And now look at what I’ve spotted!

Doughy (ˈdəʊi) and Yeast (jiːst) — the symbols in the brackets are the International Phonetic Alphabet representations of the words using the British accent which I got from toPhonetics.

The last syllable of doughy and the first syllable of yeast match. So, if I combine them, I can call a bagel the doughyeast bagel of them all.

There it is! Success!

I admit that there is a little mental jump to go from doughy to doughiest and to doughyeast, but the more you practice, the more natural it becomes. The more you start matching syllables, the more effortless finding puns becomes.

Moreover, if we want the pun to say something specific — like it is a bad bagel — we can focus on those words in our bucket such as stale, chalky, moldy, chewy, doughy, unseasoned, etc.

While doughyeast might not be the best pun, the point here is that I picked a random word and applied my technique to come up with one pun. All of them are not going to be good, but when you force yourself to create 10 puns, 1 of them is bound to be decent.

Why Should I Try This Hard?

I showed you just one kind of pun! There are whole other types of puns where an entire word is replaced in a quote or sentence to add a whole new comedic meaning to it.

You’ll find several other words out there — both common and proper nouns — eligible for mind-blowing connections that no human has ever made.

Because pop culture changes every few years, new slang is added, and world events bring new people and nations to light — there is always something new going on.

This means that your opportunity to make new puns is infinite!

And everyone has their own unique combination of interests. So, everyone’s life experiences make them uniquely qualified to come up with puns that only they could make. You can be the first person (probably not but still) to find a hilarious combination that no human mind has thought of before.

At the end of the day, the best puns are those that combine two different concepts that surprisingly have one thing in common. The more mind-blowing and unobvious the commonality is, the more it reveals about the word being punned.