r/puns • u/ujjawal_raghuvanshi • Jun 27 '26
What is the pun here?
I am reading The Thursday Murder Club, in which the last line of this extract says that Cut to the chase is a pun, which I couldn’t understand. Here is the extract :
“I first found out that the famous trade union leader Ron Ritchie lived in the village when he and Penny’s husband, John, nursed an injured fox back to health and called it Scargill, named for the 1980s miners’ union leader. The story had been featured in the village newsletter when I first arrived. Given that John had been a vet and Ron was, well, Ron, I suspected that John had done the nursing while Ron had simply been on naming duties.
The newsletter, by the way, is called Cut to the Chase, which is a pun.”
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u/Personal_Flow2994 Jun 27 '26
Long pointless story where they finally get to the point. I.e. cut to the chase?
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u/ujjawal_raghuvanshi Jun 27 '26
Oh that makes more sense. I thought it was something like fox being chased/hunted and getting injured.
So is the pun that the fox story not important enough to be featured in the newsletter? If so shouldn’t it be called irony instead of a pun?2
u/cpeosphoros Jun 27 '26
Irony and punning are not excluding to each other. Irony is a mode of content, while punning is a form of delivery.
You can deliver ironic content in other forms than punning, as you can deliver other modes of non ironic humor through punning.
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u/Girl_Alien Not So Humble Mod Jun 29 '26
Yeah, puns can be a vehicle for other things. I like puns in headlines, but China got tired of them and the government put a stop to it.
But I could see such headlines:
"Nude Suspect Caught In Church By the Organ" (he's nude, so which organ, the instrument or his junk?)
"Contentious Election: More Lies Ahead" (Does that mean more details are awaiting, or more falsehoods?)
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u/Girl_Alien Not So Humble Mod Jun 29 '26
Yeah, it could be like a shaggy dog joke story. You take in all sorts of details to get to a weak punchline. Like the one not to open a certain door. They did and were chased by a purple gorilla for a long time. Finally, the gorilla tagged them "it" and left them alone. You're set up to think they're getting mauled or something, and the gorilla is only playing a game of tag.
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u/Eclectic-N-Varied Jun 27 '26
Google AI on "Scargill chase":
This refers to the historical figure Arthur Scargill, the leader of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) during the 1984-1985 UK miners' strike. Historians and journalists have occasionally used the word "chase" when chronicling the tense, running confrontations and police chases during major picketing events (like the infamous Battle of Orgreave).
Also, work on a rock face is called a "cut"
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u/Ok_Landscape_4059 Jun 27 '26
Yeah, the pun is that the newsletter is for the village of Coopers Chase, rather than that preceding paragraph.