7 WIT HAPPENS: COMPUTATIONAL MODELS OF PUNNING AND WORDPLAY

Puns are hard to avoid, yet they remain the only kind of joke for which we feel any need to apologize when we produce one by accident. Is this because we hold even deliberate puns in low regard, or because we associate them all, good and bad, with the schoolyard? Take this pun, a punning riddle to be precise, whose wit has not improved any since it first fell out of a Christmas cracker in the 1970s: Q: How many ears does Mr. Spock have? A: Three. The left ear, the right ear, and the final front ear.