Pun Puppets

Discussion
The characters may be normal people (e.g. customers or roommates), but because the situation they find themselves in turns out to be constructed around an abstract idea, we've grouped them together here. None of these characters have a real personality, they only serve as puppets to voice the pun-heavy lines. In that sense, they are just as much a personification as the characters calling themselves Monday or Appendix. Their world is called Word Play and we'll call the characters Pun Puppets.

The first sketches which heavily relied on wordplay turned up as early as 2013 (the two Umm sketches are a good example), but their formats and styles varied and in most cases there was at least a hint of a storyline with named characters. The first one with the word wordplay in the title and Arms in his now well-known role as the unnamed customer, Word Play Hotel, premiered in October 2018. A little earlier, in March, Pc Pc Shop premiered as the first sketch where puns were thrown around in a shop setting using unnamed characters. In our selection of sketches below that fit this category, we'll take that one as the first 'true' wordplay sketch. Note that we didn't include the Rise of Amazon wordplay sketch (literally renamed "Word Play Shop Names" somewhere around the end of 2020!) because this is a better example of multi-character meetup sketches. Included however is Thrift Shop Mannequins, even though these characters aren't strictly human, because they are distinct characters rather than concepts or ideas (like the Party With... sketches) and there's just one character per actor - and plenty of wordplay of course!

As of 2021, there's a whole series of Word Play sketches featuring Arms as a recurring put-upon customer character. And what an interesting life he leads! Even though there's no real storyline to these sketches, it's fun to try and shoehorn one in! This guy seems to have had a staggering amount of partners, jobs, and most of all accidents in his life! He actually reminds me of the blue moustachioed muppet in those Grover sketches on Sesame Street!

There are some exceptions to Arms as the main character, i.e. whenever Foil turns up in the pairing. He's been cast as both the customer (in One Stop Wedding Shop) and the shopkeeper (in Hardware Shop). And Hog has taken on the part of the customer in The PC Pc Shop. But I've got to say, casting Arms in the role of the role of the 'punching bag' - or should that be punning bag?? - is the way forward for these. His and Hog's reactions and delivery are absolutely spot on using this dynamic. Just read the comments and take a look at the amount of likes and shares for these videos: they're wildly popular and rightly so!

The principal writer for these sketches is Arms himself, and it's a well-known unwritten rule that the writer gets to cast the sketch! As it's very often a duo sketch featuring Arms and Hog, Foil is likely to be the director. The camera is mounted on a tripod with an over-the-shoulder camera angle, and the edit is very snappy using the shot-counter shot structure.

A lot of the popularity (and views, I'm sure) has something to do with the sheer amount of puns crammed into each sketch. I only catch around half of them on my first watch, but then again I'm foreign. Speaking of language barriers: the team of YouTube captioners understandably have somewhat of a hard time translating these sketches!

Use the gallery below to click through to the individual Wordplay sketches on the FAH YouTube channel. Underneath, we'll try to summarise the storylines and get to the bottom of the Life And Times of Word Play Guy!

Figurative speech taken literally
This is of course the basis of wordplay in the first place and a classic ingredient in sketch comedy on the whole.

Wooden characters making puns pop
Emotions aren't acted out realistically at all, which is not unusual for sketch comedy of course. But rather than overplaying an emotion, the opposite often happens: a character's reaction is underplayed as if the words don't really have much of an effect at all. The unreal-ness of their emotions allows us to really focus on the torrent of puns and punchlines coming out of their mouths.

Cartoonish behaviours
Remember Jerry dropping a hot iron on Tom's head, making a huge dent in it, only for the cat to shake it off and be normal again the very next moment? The way these sketches are edited makes it seem like an action in shot 1 doesn't have any bearing on shot 2. When a character is suddenly wearing a hat or drinking a pint in a shot, it only takes a counter shot in between to get rid of it and wear or do something else.

Pun-Unawareness
Either the characters themselves don't seem to be aware of the fact that they're speaking in puns, or it's simply the normal thing to do for them. That goes for all characters involved in the conversation, so while there's definitely a stooge in these set-ups, it's not a straight man. Both characters are equally silly and have a similar status. Their back-and-forth is balanced, there's no one 'insane' character making a 'normal' one tear his hair out. For that reason, The One Stop Wedding Shop isn't listed here: Foil's 'straight man' character is acutely aware of the exaggerated silliness of the situation, it's only Hog's character whose expressions are wildly comical.

Sketches such as When The Wind Changed and How to Destroy a Family have a different dynamic as well. In these, characters might for example explain why a specific phrase - also taken very literally rather than figuratively - has had an impact on their lives. They borrow from mockumentary or infomercial formats and while they could never be true, the obvious parallels with real-life people (and their mad ideas) are important for the jokes to land.