RUFF WORK

A man appears to be carving the mouth of a large dog made of wood. A passerby comments, “What are you up to?” The carver replies, “I’m trying to make him speak.” The first guy says, “You can’t make a dog from wood bark.”

What’s so funny about this? I just got a fresh new supply of puns and this is the first one that caught my eye and made me laugh. Of course, as I say “caught my eye” I realize this brings to mind fishing for eyeballs and if one of my eyes were ever literally hooked, I wouldn’t be too happy about it, But that expression belongs with the idioms in my other blog, Rolls off the Tongue. This joke has a couple of interesting things going for it. First of all is the double meaning of “bark” and “make”. Besides the lexical level, there’s grammar involved here too. “Bark” can be both a noun and a verb. It’s also a pure homonym – same word, same spelling, different meanings. As a noun, “bark” means the skin, or outer layer of a tree, so it’s related to wood. In fact, wood carvi