Adam from the wonderfully bombastically named Supergoodtees mailed me a link to their Nerd Slogan Dept. the other day. Being a lover of a good pun - and unwilling to pay the shipping costs for the American shirt vendors I hear so much about - I couldn't resist checking it out.

Here's a few punny slogans that particularly amused me. Something for every occasion:

For your day job at the trendy web design company.

For your holiday in Chile.

For pretending to be American  Irish Irish-American on St. Patrick's Day.

This got me thinking about the place of the pun in modern society. Given my recent experiences with stand up, I'd begun to get the feeling that puns were something of a guilty pleasure. Many consider puns to be passe, or lazy writing, or labelled them with the classic get-out phrase of comedic criticism "they're not funny". I'd regularly found myself (and others) stifling laughter, or substituting a groan to avoid admitting that yes, we enjoyed that sentence substituting a word for a homophone referring to human genitalia.

Of course, in stand up, a comedian is actively seeking a response. Their every word is offered up for judgement by the fickle crowd. Use a lot of puns, and the Pun Police in the room will be determined not to utter a single amused grunt. T-shirts, on the other hand, demand no such response. You wear the words for yourself, and whatever others may think, they will keep it to themselves. Unless they're particularly vindictive. As mothers all over the world say: "Anyone who makes fun of you for wearing a shirt isn't really your friend."

But that's just my take on it. Perhaps you love puns. Perhaps you hate them in all forms. Perhaps you think I'm reading far too much into the situation and stopped reading a paragraph and a half ago. To you I say