Frank and Ernest and Brewster Rockit: Fun--and not so much fun--with puns.

All puns are bad. Take the above installment of the always awful Frank and Ernest, for example.

But some puns are so bad they're good. Stephen Pastis is the master, but Tim Rickard pulls of some pretty decent punnery, too.

The difference between bad puns and so-bad-they're-good puns lies mostly in the set-up. The better the set-up, the funnier the pun. The set-up in that Frank and Ernest is just lazy, and so the pun comes off as lazy, too. The set-up in Brewster Rockit, meanwhile, is so absurd and unexpected that the pun is sort of funny. Likewise, the set-up in the linked Pearls Before Swine is so ornate that the pun is sort of funny. In each case, it's not really the pun that produces the humor, but all the obvious and self-conscious effort the author put into the set-up to make the pun work.

On its own, a pun is a just a pun, after all. And everybody knows puns suck. The trick to making them funny is taking them seriously.