These simple games are like little puzzles. Good for novice comedians, improvisers, people interested in improving their creative thinking skills in a simple and fun way, or just looking for an alternative to sudoku =)
Puns are words that sound alike (bear/bare, paws/pause, cards/carbs), different meanings of the same word (potato chips / computer chips, train station / train a dog), words within words (cat/cat-astrophe). Take a word, and change a few letters to turn it into a different word, and you've made a pun.
Start with common idioms, phrases, books, movie titles, song titles, and then change them into a pun.
A Tale of Two Cities > A Tail of Two Kitties
Jurassic Park > Jurassic Parking
The Walking Dead > The Working Dad
More advanced version: pick a specific topic, and make puns related to that topic:
Topic: Food
Beauty and the Beast > Beauty and the Yeast
House of Cards > House of Carbs
Break a leg > Bake a leg
Use the puns to fill in the following template:
[blank] walks into a bar. The bartender says, we don’t serve [blanks] here. The [blank] says [pun].
For example:
A penguin walks into a bar. The bartender says, 'We don't serve penguins here.' The penguin says, 'Well, this place isn't very ICE to visitors'.
To do this step by step:
Topic: Cow.
Related words: Bell, herd, horns, tail, graze, offal, beef.
Pun: Herd/heard, graze/grace, offal/awful, beef/brief.
Joke:
A cow walks into a bar.
The bartender says, "We don't serve cows here."
The cow says, "Why are you being so offal to me?"
This game is similar to the bartender game, but in a different format:
How come oysters never donate to charity? Because they’re shellfish.
Step by step example:
Topic: Cats
Related words: Whiskers, tail, paws, meow.
Puns: Whiskers / whisk her (away). Tail / detectives tailing someone, cat/category.
Joke: How did they catch a cat burglar? There was a tail.
The trick is to come up with a punchline that uses the 2nd word of the pun, but also grammatically makes sense with the first one. Then make a setup that uses the first one.
Pun: Cat/category.
Punch line ideas: fit in a category, categorize something, categorically false.
With a setup: Why do cats make such great librarians? They love to categorize things.
One more example:
Litter/literature: What's a kitten's favorite subject in school? Litter-ature!
Same as a previous game, but instead of a strict question-answer format, you can use any statement, sentence, lines of dialogue.
Topic: Birds.
Related words: Wings, beaks, fly, nest, eggs, peck, feather.
Puns: Wings/wing-man, beak/beakon, peck/impeccable, eggs/legs.
Wings/wing-man:I always bring my pigeon to nightclubs, he's a great wing-man.
Peck/impeccable: Buy this fence, and your chickens will never escape! It's impeckable!
Topic: Factory work.
Words: Worker, union, blue collar, machine, printing press, production, foreman.
Worker's union / marriage union:
Take one of the following templates and a random topic.
Name things that are true about the topics and make an absurd yet grammatically correct combination with the template.
Sex with me is like...
A more freeform version of the previous game. Pick two random topics (it's useful to make one of them slightly racy/naughty/nsfw). Then come up with a statement that's true about both topics.
Cats are like...
This is an exaggeration/heightening game. Fill in this template:
[Topic] is so [attribute] that [exaggerated example]
For example:
My cat is so picky...
she sends her water bowl back to the kitchen for being the wrong temperature
she interviews other families before letting them pet her
My roommate is so messy...
the health department classified our apartment as a new ecosystem
even my garbage complained about living with him
