Can you create a play on words...without the words? Even the most groan-worthy pun can come to life thanks to the magic of "show, don't tell". Let's be clear: a pun is not necessarily the same thing as a joke. A pun depends on the double-meaning of a word or phrase, or a superficial similarity between two words or phrases with different meanings. Or, in the words of Wikipedia, "deliberately exploits ambiguity between similar-sounding words for humorous or rhetorical effect." Like this:
PUNS: A boulder and a cinnamon roll playing in a rock and roll band. A shoe with horns. A refrigerator running in a marathon. Mozart leading a wolf gang. (Not that these are necessarily funny puns. We didn't want to use up all the good ideas here.)
NOT PUNS: A familiar image with a zombie in it for no particular reason. A cartoon character at home doing something mundane and un-cartoony. Some food horrified to discover that some of their fellow food has been roasted alive. An animal that thinks it's people.
Examples of visual puns in previous Shirt.Woot designs include Six Degrees of Delicious (bacon vs. Kevin Bacon), Organ Rejection (conflating the medical and social connotations of rejection), The T Shirt (a t-shirt about the letter T), and Suburban Blitzkrieg (bomb pops used as actual bombs). Sorry to belabor the point, but we guarantee you a lot of people will submit t-shirt designs that aren't puns, even after all this. We're just trying to save some wear on our rejecting fingers.
No text.
No video-game references.
