What are puns, exactly?

Puns are witty and humorous play-on-words. Pun-based jokes make use of the comedic potential of a word because it has different meanings or sounds like another word.

Take a look at this one:

The present, the past, and the future walked into a bar. It was tense.

This joke takes advantage of the adjective and noun senses of the word ‘tense’ (i.e. verb tenses and causing anxiety).

Puns or pun-based jokes are usually short with one or two lines. Here are some examples of one-liners from the WEB:

A boiled egg every morning is hard to beat (a classic pun)
The advantages of easy origami are two-fold (by Tim Vine, a comedian from the UK)
Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt” (rumored to be coined by Mark Twain)
Dogs can’t operate an MRI machine, but Catscan
Always trust a glue salesman. They tend to stick to their word.
Becoming vegetarian was a huge missed steak
The duck said to the bartender, ‘Put it on my bill.

If you’d like more puns, check out https://www.yourdictionary.com/slideshow/funny-pun-examples.html

Have a puntastic day!