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Poor Punning Alert

Posted by on March 30 2009 in Rants & Raves

chewniversity.JPG

I don’t know if the rest of the country is as thickly blanketed in the newest Snickers marketing campaign as New York is, but I’ve been seeing these lame-o ads on every subway, taxi and billboard for the last month, and as a world-renowned expert in food punnery, I simply cannot stay silent any longer.

As loyal readers of Endless Simmer certainly know by now, your humble editors clearly enjoy a corny food pun now and again. But even the lowest form of humor has some standards.

There are good puns, which make you laugh out loud and applaud the punner’s cleverness. There are decent puns, which make you think a minute and then say, “Oh, I get it. Ha.” There are, of course, bad puns, which inevitably set off a chorus of hearty groans, but even these just have to be said sometimes.

And then there are Snickers puns:

Take night classes at chewniversity…Flash your snackstage pass…Get funky on the snaxophone…Take a field trip to the peanutarium…Go camping in the Snackorondacks.

I mean WTF? Not only are these not laugh-worthy, they’re not ha-worthy, and they’re not even groan-worthy! You just kind of look at them and go, “Oh. Why did I read that?”

Seriously, I am getting mad all over again just writing about this. The poor pun does not deserve to be abused like this! Someone got paid to come up with these phrases? They are so far from funny that they should never have been allowed to come out of a person’s mouth, much less written down and pasted all over town.

In fact, I’m so personally offended by the unfunny-ness of these ads, that I hereby declare a one-man boycott of Snickers bars, effective immediately. It might be difficult, but I believe I candy do it.

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13 Responses leave one →
  1. brian permalink
    March 30, 2009

    Now you’re just speaking snacklish.

  2. Lisa permalink
    March 30, 2009

    Brendan,
    I hope you saw the Times op-ed column on punning on Saturday: (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/28/opinion/28Tartakovsky.html?scp=1&sq=pun&st=cse).
    I loved this description of punsters: “They are the scourge of dinner tables and the despised prolongers of office meetings.”

  3. March 30, 2009

    god – why didn’t I think to submit that?

  4. March 30, 2009

    I hear you. When I saw SNAXI the other day, on top of a cab, i really wanted to die. Really.

  5. miked. permalink
    March 30, 2009

    Why you slurpin’ on that Haterade?
    This is funny:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBF1lsZUlUI
    the master P-nut one, too.

  6. March 30, 2009

    I was going to mention the “Get bling’d out with Masta P-Nut” but someone mentioned that already. I feel like it’s a waste of my brain space to remember them but somehow I do. Well, not right now.

  7. March 30, 2009

    Meh… I don’t know. The “chewniversity” ad made me snicker…

  8. March 30, 2009

    Sorry. Just made myself groan from my earlier comment.

  9. March 31, 2009

    The Snickers ones are bad…but they’re also competing with those Lifetime movies ones. Even the glimpse of Jason Lewis shirtless can’t inspire me to stop hating them.

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