AEE 2686: Joke, Pun, or Prank? What’s the Difference?

This is an All Ears English podcast, episode 2686. Joke, pun, or prank? What's the difference? Welcome to the All Ears English Podcast, downloaded more than 200 million times.

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Hey, Lindsay, how are you today? Doing good. Doing good. Aubrey, how's it going? I am great. I'm excited to talk about jokes, puns, and pranks today. How fun.

I know. Aubrey, do you know any good jokes? I mean, you got anything off the top of your head you could share with us? Sure, I've got one that my son loved.

The first time I told him this, he laughed so hard. So maybe it's better for little kids, but it is, what do you call a fish with no eyes? Oh, that's a good question. What?

What's the answer? I love you remove the I in the word fish, right? So you say that FSH. So that's kind of a pun and a joke. It's a fun little language joke.

I love language jokes. I love a play on words. And it's always fun when you tell a kid and it takes them just a second to figure it out and then they get it and they're like thrilled. And then they die of laughter, right?

This is unfiltered laughter. So cute. So this episode was inspired by a student. And who was that student, Aubrey? So Geneviève from France in our open conversation club, one of our live speaking events asked, you know, what is the difference between a joke, a pun and a prank?

Great question. We talked about it in this open conversation club. And I immediately was like, this is going to be a fun episode of the podcast. Yeah, this is really fun.

I mean, I listened to this one podcast, the Wall Street Journal podcast, and the host, Ryan something, he's always doing puns. Like anytime he's interviewing someone from the airline industry, he's always like, I don't know, there's always puns that I find really funny, but some people find them annoying. I know not everybody loves puns, but I always point them out if I accidentally make a pun, right? Yeah, yeah.

I think they're very fun, especially sometimes they're really clever. Sometimes they are more like a dad joke, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It depends on the quality of the pun, but they can be really fun for sure.

Guys, we're getting into this topic of jokes, puns, pranks today, but hit follow because we get into so many different things on this podcast. Aubrey, earlier last week, we were talking about following our intuition. We've talked about some great stuff lately. Yes, exactly.

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All right. Let's break it down for our listeners to make it super clear. What is a joke then? What is a joke? So a joke is anything someone says that is intended to make people laugh.

It can be a story, a question, a funny comment. This is pretty loose and flexible. Lots of things can be a joke, right? Yeah. Yeah. So for example, he told a funny joke during lunch that made everyone laugh.

Right? Or she always has a joke ready when meetings get boring. Yeah. And yeah, I love a joke. You know, of course, when you go to a stand up comedy, a comedian has five to 30 to an hour of jokes ready.

And some of them are long, there's a build up, there are Callbacks, which is where it's referring to something earlier. So there are all kinds of different jokes and all kinds of different humors depending on, you know, there's more dry humor, which is very typical for the UK. Slapstick humor, dad jokes.

There's all these different types of jokes, right? There's so much. You could study it, really. I mean, I think the best comedians are the ones that do the callbacks.

I didn't know what the term was. I love a callback. At the end, they make it feel like the whole thing has come full circle and it just feels like pure art. Exactly.

By a really good comedian. It's incredible. It's something really fun and clever that brings it all full circle. I agree. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And as a bonus here, I want our listeners to know the phrase jokester.

Right. Right. You're a jokester. Right. You're always telling jokes. He's kind of a jokester, kind of a rare slang. But do you use that ever? I do. I'll say what a jokester.

Yeah. We might say like, what a comedian. But it is a term of endearment, at least in the States. We really appreciate a sense of humor. We love if someone can be clever, can make us laugh.

But it is like there's the dad jokes where we might say that to like some dad telling a lot of corny jokes. We might be like, what a jokester. But it's still playful. It's not like mean.

And pretty soon, actually very soon in the next coming weeks, we're coming out with our brand new course, which I'm super excited about, Aubrey, socializing in English, right? How to socialize in English. We will be covering humor in there because it has to be covered. So look for that, guys.

That's a big part of it. Yeah, absolutely. We'll tell you more about that soon. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and this is part of it to be able to tell a joke in a second language is extremely difficult in your first language.

I'm sure you've got it down. But that is tough as you're learning English to be able to tell a joke, the timing, the wit to know there's so much that goes into that. How to tell a joke, how to react to a joke, everything around humor. There's so much there and it does vary cross-culturally.

So we'll get into that in the course. Keep your eyes and ears open for more information about that, guys. But Aubrey, what is a pun then? So this is our second term.

Very different, right? Yeah. Not all jokes are puns, but all puns are jokes, right? Because a pun is wordplay. It's a specific type of joke that plays with multiple meanings or maybe similar sounds of words.

So yeah, the one I said, it depends because it's usually is more about a play on words, two words that might have the same meaning. Yeah. Now here, okay. I think we just need to give some examples, Aubrey.

This is a good one. I used to be a baker, but I couldn't make enough dough. Ah, but I'm ching. But I'm ching. You got to have some kind of joke. Why is that a pun?

Yeah. So the word dough, of course, is yeast and bread and flour, you know, flour and water that is dough that we use to make all these baked goods. And we also use the word dough to mean money in English. So when you say I couldn't make enough dough, that's the double meaning of the dough a baker would need to actually make food and money.

Yeah. It's kind of interesting. You kind of have to think quite flexibly to understand a pun, right? You have to kind of open your mind to maybe I'm missing one of the meanings of these words, right?

Exactly. And I actually have a good friend from Puerto Rico that one of the things I respect the most about her, there will be puns, there will be wordplay, and she is savvy enough she can pick up on. There was some kind of joke here that I missed and she's not afraid to ask. She'll be like, okay, wait, what was the double meaning that I missed?

Or like, what was the innuendo that I missed? And we're happy to be like, oh, because it also means money or whatever, right? She's very fluent. So a lot of it she'll pick up on.

But if ever there's something she missed, she asks. And I love that about because then she can be in on the joke. She doesn't want to just like pretend she got it, right? Oh, that's the worst feeling.

Try to pretend. Yeah, exactly. We've all been there. I've done that in Spanish and French. I'm like, I'm just going to pretend I understood. Yeah. I know.

Yeah, but don't do it because it could be an opportunity for connection right there. Like this one, the calendar factory fired me because I took a day off. How is this a pun, Aubrey? So a day off, right?

Of course, if you take a day off of work, that means that you are not going to go to work for the day. But then because on a calendar, if you literally take a day off, that would mean like removing Monday or Wednesday, like removing Physically, yeah. And if you were to do that, you might not work long for the calendar makers.

Calendar factory. Exactly. So this is often how a pun works is you have the literal meaning, like if you're literally to take a day off a calendar, and then we have the more idiomatic meaning of taking a day off meaning not going to work for a day. Yeah, that's a good formula for a pun, right?

So if you know, you understand the literal meaning like dough, right? We know literally it's dough. It's the stuff that goes into creating bread. Think about what could be the metaphorical or what could be the non-literal meaning.

Exactly. Yeah. So whenever you find words or phrases that have two separate meanings, you can create a pun to use them both. Exactly. The humor comes from the language itself, which is clever.

Yeah, really clever. Let's do a role play, Aubrey. Here we go. I'll start us out. Ready? Okay. Which animal gets the best scores on exams? Oh, I don't know, Aubrey.

Which one does? The cheetah. Yeah. That's a dad joke for sure. That's a dad joke. I like it. This was one I did because we had to send words of encouragement or jokes with our kids on the exam day.

And all mine were puns. And my kids love them. Oh, that's adorable. That's adorable. I love that. So we have the animal, a cheetah, right? Which you might see in a zoo.

Big cat. Yeah, a big cat. And then, of course, cheater in English is someone who would cheat on an exam. And And this is also kind of playing with accents because you wouldn't say cheater, but some people in their regional dialect, they drop the R at the end of the word so you can say a cheetah and it still sounds like cheater in English, right?

Yeah. You might find that in, for example, we've talked about a Boston accent. Right. East Coast, New York, maybe Philadelphia. Yeah, exactly. Mm-hmm.

All right. Then we have pranks, Sabri. How are they different? Totally. Yes. So this is very different, right? This is an action or a trick that's played on someone for amusement.

So it's not something that you're just saying to someone. It's something you're going to do, right? It involves doing something. Are you a prankster, Lindsay?

Ever do you play pranks? In high school, I think I was. We did play pranks on our friends in high school. I don't know. But I never thought they were very funny.

They were just always like, I guess funny because you think about the person walking to the parking lot and discovering their car has been toilet papered or things like that. But it's not actually funny. funny it's just like well you bring up a really good point that sometimes pranks are funny like they're silly sometimes it's funny but sometimes it's not it can be mean-spirited or if you like scare someone or let it go on too long then it's the kind of humor that like the person being pranked probably won't think it's funny and it's more people laughing at them so there's sort of an art to this and it's not easy

Sometimes we see this on April Fool's Day, right? April 1st, we see this a lot. We play pranks on April 1st. So for example, my brother hid all my shoes as a prank.

Like that's a harmless, funny prank. All your shoes are hidden. He's laughing somewhere and you'd probably laugh too, but you'd be like, okay. It's not like a joke funny, but it's just kind of, you know, you might laugh about it later if you tell the story.

Right. So when I was in college, you were saying you did this younger. When I was in college, we created all of these fake parking tickets and we would put fake parking tickets on our friends' cars. And I haven't grown out of it because I did that to my husband not that long ago.

But I'm better now as I get older of letting them in on the joke quicker. As soon as they believe it and they're panicking, then I let them know it's a prank. Whereas once upon a time... I probably would have left it for a while.

Make them go to the office to dispute it and then find out it's not real. I took it too far. Oh, you took it too far. I was always afraid that someone was going to...

This is sort of a mean and disgusting, but sometimes I've heard people put saran wrap on a toilet. So when you go to the bathroom... terrible. I was always afraid someone was going to do that to me, but no one ever did.

You were like checking every time. Yeah. Yeah. Kind of. Still do. Still do. Yeah. So this is different. So very different from puns and sort of a joke, but kind of not.

Sort of a practical joke is another way we might call that. Yeah. There's a TV show called Impractical Jokers. My kids like watching it sometimes where they're playing pranks.

They're playing pranks on people just to catch the video of their reactions and Yeah. So it's funny. And you have to be able to take a joke, right? If someone's playing a prank on you, if you get really upset, that's true.

Like you'd have to just, you know, be able to take a joke. And there was also the classic when we were kids, we used to do prank calls. We had a babysitter would be like, let's prank call. Like it's so bad if you think about it now, right?

Yeah. It's so funny, but I still, we used to do that all the time. And there's a TikToker now who does it. And she, a lot of people out there will probably know who I'm talking about.

She disguises her voice and calls herself Sue and she pranks people constantly and videos them. And so I'm like, prank calls are still alive and well. There's still 11 of all the classic one we used to do. I'm sure they don't do it anymore.

But we would call a random person in the phone book and say, oh, excuse me, ma'am. Is your refrigerator running? Right? And then they'd say, yes. And then you say, well, you better go catch it.

And then you'd hang up and laugh. Did you actually do that one? I saw that one on TV once, but I didn't know anyone who ever really did that. I love it.

We did that one. That's funny. So fun. So fun. All right. Here we go. In your first language, you have personality. You joke, you interrupt, you push back, but in English, you might feel smaller, more careful, less expressive than you really are.

If English feels like it's filtering your personality, it may be time to understand why. Our free two-minute fluency quiz helps you see what's holding you back from speaking freely and naturally and connecting. Plus, you get your current English level. Is it B1, B2, or C1?

Find out today. Take the quiz now at allearsenglish.com slash fluency score. That's allearsenglish.com slash F-L-U-E-N-C-Y-S-C-O-R-E. All right, Aubrey, we're back from break.

So now our listeners understand the difference between prank, pun, and joke. Let's get into a role play, shall we? Yeah. You and I are coworkers in this role play.

I'll start us out. Okay. Did you hear the joke Ryan told earlier? Yeah. About the scarecrow winning an award because he was outstanding in his field. Yes.

I have to remember that one so I can tell my son. He loves puns. Does your son like to prank people? Yes. He'll hide my phone, for example, but then he'll let me look for it way too long.

He finally lets me in on the joke. What about you? When's the last time you pranked someone? Last year, Blake and I covered Janet's car in post-it notes.

I remember that. She walked outside and couldn't stop laughing. I'm a fan of a harmless prank. Same. It's an art to fool someone without taking it so far that you actually upset them.

Yeah, it's the art of finding the line without upsetting them, right? Without causing them any problems like being late to work or something. Right. And knowing you to prank because not everybody can take a joke.

Like some people will just get mad or they'll just know it's not real and roll their eyes and that's no fun. Wasted effort. It's true. Yeah, you have to choose the right person, but it is fun when you can do it.

So where did we use our, we use joke at the top of the role play, Aubrey, right? Did you hear the joke Ryan told earlier? And then we have a joke here. What's funny about that joke, Aubrey?

Yeah. So the scarecrow won an award because he was outstanding in his field. So this is a pun. It's a joke that it's a play on words, right? We have outstanding meaning excellent.

If you're outstanding in your field, that means you're excellent at your job. But also scarecrows are just outstanding in fields, right? So that's why it's definitely a dad joke, but a good pun. It's a good one.

And then you said, I have to remember it so I can tell my son he loves puns. And so that's also a joke and a pun, right? Exactly. And then you ask, oh, does your son like to prank people?

And I share, and this is true. My son would prank us, but he would let it go way too long. He would let us like look for something he had hidden till we're like angry and whatever.

So then I've, I've now taught him the art of like letting someone in on the joke right away. And I've had him practice. I'll have him like, I'll help him prep a prank for his dad. And then I'll like, and then I'm there with him.

And if he doesn't let him in, I'm like, okay, here's where you need to let him in on the joke. Okay. Because it just can't go so long that someone's getting angry or super frustrated. It's knowing when to let them in.

And actually, that should be a bonus phrase for today, right? To let someone in on the joke. There's a lot of prepositions there, Aubrey, right? Exactly.

And it's really tricky. You have to use it word for word, right? You can't say let them on or out. We let someone in on a joke means we tell them we were pranking them.

We tell them it was a joke before it's too late. Yeah, I love it. Great episode today. Super important for connection. And we're going to have a part two on this episode, right, Aubrey?

Yes. Hit follow for part two. We've got a lot of idioms we use about jokes and about sense of humor. So hit follow for that coming up in a few weeks. Hit that follow button and go check out episode 2678, why and how to connect over sleep in English.

Was that you and Michelle that did that one together? Yes, that was a good one. And we do. We talk about sleep and how little or how much of it we're getting a lot.

So you want to be able to connect about that. Yeah, I love it. I love it. Anything that kind of emphasizes our humanity, telling jokes, sleep, intuition.

These are things that we look for here in All Our English, these topics, guys. And it's what you need to know to connect. It's not the perfection of the grammar. It's topics like these.

Exactly. It's so true. Tell a joke, right? Get that humor down. Play a prank, but then let people in on the joke before they get angry. There's such an art to it.

And it is a great way to connect with other people. Yeah, great stuff. All right, Aubrey, you have a good rest of your day. I'll see you back here on the show very soon.

All right. You too. See you next time. Bye. Thanks for listening to All Ears English. Would you like to know your English level? Take our two minute quiz.

Go to allearsenglish.com forward slash fluency score. And if you believe in connection, not perfection, then hit subscribe now to make sure you don't miss anything. See you next time.

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