16 Pun-Filled Jokes Your Dad Would Tell You

In the intro blurb for a collection on puns, you might expect the writer to drop a few puns. Well, you aren't going to find any here. The sixteen pun memes based on stock photos that I’ve carefully gathered for you (like fresh flowers plucked from a mountain meadow in the dew of an early April morning) are rarer and sweeter than anything I can come up with myself. Puns are splendidly simple, and more than any other kind of joke, they point us back to the garden of delights and disasters that is the English language.

Dads and teachers make puns because they’re the sort of joke that never gets old, and you share puns because you want to share a G-rated joy. In these memes, the addition of figures from stock photos like Hide the Pain Harold make the puns seem kind of surreal: the point of a stock photo is to look as normal as possible, but these memes find humor by making conventional stock photo people say quite unconventional things. That wasn’t the clearest explanation, but I think you know what I meme.