Give A Feghoot

Long-drawn-out puns that will make you groan

[pun-and-ink]

What Could Have Been

Lyle was a carpenter who lived out in the country. One day his sanding tool broke, and hoping to avoid a long trip into town, he decided to look around his house for something to replace it. But search as he did, nothing seemed to do the trick, so he went for a walk, hoping it would clear his mind and give him some ideas.

Out in the fields, many of the long grasses and flowers gave way to thorny weeds, and among them, the burr plant. One look at the burrs told him that they would be perfect. He plucked as many as he could and carried them all home, then set to work rubbing them against a plank of wood.

They worked, but slowly. He needed more force; he couldn't hope to sand it properly with just his hands. After experimenting with different setups, he finally found the perfect solution—attaching the burrs to some old kneepads, he knelt on the wood and moved his legs around over their surface, dragging the burrs along until the wood had a beautiful, smooth finish.

He could hardly believe it—this simple contraption worked better than his sanding tool! It was too great an invention to keep to himself; he had to share this with the world. Who knew, maybe he could make a fortune from this.

So he sanded down several pieces of scrap wood so that he might hand them out as samples, loaded them into the back of his truck, and drove into the city. He lay them out in a row and waited for someone to stop by.

Someone did, and asked what he had there.

He replied proudly, excited to give away his first sample, "burr-knee sanders wood—have one!"

[pun-and-ink]

Mental Activity

"Please stop thinking for a minute."

"Stop what?"

"Thinking."

"But why?"

"You're doing it right now; I said stop it."

"But what'll I do?"

The technician sighed. "It's only for a minute. We're updating all thinking cap lightbulbs to LEDs."

"What good will that do?"

"What good won't it do for Mother Earth? Think about that for a minute." The technician tapped her head for emphasis.

Boris did. "Alright then, but only for a minute." He unclipped the strap and pulled the cap off his head.

The technician made short work of it. Now the light would burn twice as bright for ten times as long. She handed it back to him.

"What's that?" He said.

"Your thinking cap."

"My what?"

She sighed. "You've got to put this back on."

"Why?"

"So you can think."

He tried to think about this, but found that he couldn't.

"Come again?"

She sighed again. "Just do what I tell you."

"Do...what...I..tell...you..." he sounded out each word but found them all meaningless.

All through the day she'd seen this happen. Some people just weren't good at thinking without their caps and they always gave her the hardest time. If she didn't act fast enough, he'd become a vegetable, and remain so even after she got his cap back on. She pressed a button on the walkie-talkie on her belt.

"I'm going to need some backup over here."

Boris sat in his chair and looked at the white wall with a mind as spotless as its uninterrupted surface.

The walkie-talkie crackled. "We're all tied up at the moment. There's been an incident..."

Boris glanced, curious, at the talking machine on her belt. It was too loud. He wished it would turn off. Then the sound vanished. A few moments later he noticed that it had gone silent—noticed not only the dead walkie-talkie, but also the way the woman's mouth moved without any sound coming out. It was very quiet.

He happened to catch sight of his hand in the corner of his vision, but rather than being any sort of skin colour, it was a pleasant light green—in fact it was hardly a hand at all, for where his fingers should have been, little green sprouts had developed. Then his neck widened, followed by his face and forehead, and his hair fell out and from its follicles fresh little buds sprouted.

A minute later the transformation was complete. The technician sighed once more, tossed the thinking cap aside, and with a mighty heave, lifted the enormous piece of broccoli from its chair. What could she have done? With no help, there was no way she could have revived him before he became a vegetable.

[pun-and-ink]

The Harvest You Reap

After being wrongly accused of stealing top secret items, a young engineer in a Martian colony called upon the best affordable lawyer on the planet to clear her name.

“So you say they accused you of stealing these?” The lawyer said, holding up a bag of seeds, being careful not to upset the evidence.

The engineer nodded. “I’d never seen them before, but after being nearly jumped by an officer outside of Bretnor Base, a security administrator found them in my pack.”

“This sounds like a framing to me,” said the lawyer, and the engineer agreed. “But we’ll have to find some evidence of our own.”

The lawyer questioned the officer who allegedly attacked her client, and concluded that he must have slipped the highly classified Martian seeds into the engineer’s pack under the pretence of what the officer called ‘an accidental collision.’ After gathering evidence that further confirmed her hypothesis, which included accessing classified information on the evidence itself, the lawyer returned to her client.

“I believe we have all the evidence we need to prove that you were framed. Tomorrow in court, I’ll ask you certain questions, and you’re going to answer them exactly as I tell you now. After that, I will request a second look at the evidence, which will show enough weathering to be consistent with your story and contradictory to what the prosecution says.”

The engineer nodded, listening to what her lawyer had to say, and the next day they followed their plan.

The judge first let the prosecutor speak. He stood, adjusted his glasses, and began to tell a wild tale about how the defendant had intended to steal the Martian seeds and make the knowledge of their existence available to Earth before its due time. The judge seemed to consider this before giving the floor to the defence. The engineer’s lawyer stood up, smoothing her shirt. She addressed her client, asking her the questions they had gone over the previous night.

They established where the engineer had been and when, the contents of her pack, excluding the seeds, the exact nature of her encounters with the officer and the security administrator, and the high level of respect that she held for the proper handling of sensitive and classified information.

The defence concluded with, “from the premises just stated, it is clear to see that if the seeds presented as evidence are not weathered in a particular manner–that is, they are not dehydrated and dented as if hit with many blunt objects such as those found in the dependent’s pack, then we can conclude that they were transferred to her person shortly before her entry into the habitat–and subsequent emptying of the pack–and she is thus not only innocent, but was in fact framed by the officer.”

The defendant and her lawyer tried to hide their surprise as the opposition smiled openly. He must have prepared counter-arguments that she had not anticipated, the defence lawyer thought to herself, before pushing her doubts down and giving word to her final request.

“I therefore request that we be given a second look at the evidence, along with the tools necessary to properly inspect it–and if the evidence cannot be procured, I demand that the court be adjourned until it can be.”

The judge agreed to the lawyer’s demands. “Prosecution, the evidence will be removed from your possession and given to the defence. If you do not have it on your person, will you please retrieve it?”

The prosecutor’s smile grew into a smirk as he left the room to retrieve the seeds. He returned, straining under the weight of what he held. As the defence lawyer set eyes on the green shoots poking out of the pots of red soil he cradled, all doubts fled from her mind, replaced with the need to act immediately.

She stood at once, not caring that she was speaking out of order, while in the background the jury burst into heated discussion.

“Your honour, he planted the evidence!”