Poor Punning Alert

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.