Speculations on Story Puns

There is a class of joke which consists of an anecdote , which is sometimes quite long and often has no inherently humorous content, followed by a punchline which is a distorted form of some well-known phrase, proverb or quotation. Usually the punchline purports to summarise or draw a moral from the preceding story. This genre has some unusual aspects, from the viewpoint of conventional claims about the attributes of jokes. These jokes also have certain structural or formal regularities which suggest that they might be amenable to computer generation. We outline how this might be done, by decomposing the construction of such story puns into a sequence of stages; some of these are clearly manageable, others are less straightforward. We also make some observations about where such an endeavour would t within the broader eld of humour research.