A Really Bad Grammar Pun

Puns are supposed to be bad, right? Well, this one’s about grammar, so I feel compelled to post it. Sorry, no lesson.

—Except maybe to point out that all puns are linguistic in some way. this one uses homonyms.

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The joke is clearer if you give the speaker an accent so the last syllable ends with “uh” instead of “ear.”

I’d say “mot” instead of “mat” too, but some people pronounce onomatopoeia like “mat.”

I’m not sure how it’s a riddle, though.

—but it doesn’t mention the need for a pun in the last panel, even though it’s there.

Of course, the “unexpected” pun is what makes the strip funny, (the first panel calls it “stupid”), but you have to figure that out yourself.

The humor is based on the misuse of three words, which I call puns. But the lesson is about the sentence. Can you tell what she got wrong?

Yes! She wrote a complex sentence, not a compound one. Ignoring the joke, the sentence is “When a horse jumps the fence” is a subordinate clause, and the rest of the sentence is the independent clause. “The feet go over first” is the main clause, and “then the tail” is an adverbial prepositional phrase. No compound anywhere!

How would you write those three words in a compound sentence?

The guy who writes Frank and Ernest, Bob Thaves, is good at creating puns, which these are. And they rhyme.

I’ve posted some of his work before; do a search on frank and ernest in the search box on the right.