Finding Humor in Unexpected Places (Part II)

find funny is punctuation. You won’t see any sitcoms that feature grammarians tossing out quips about semi-colons. But a missing comma can easily create an unintended blooper.

Imagine, for instance, the difference in meaning between this sentence with a comma and without one:

Let’s eat, Grandpa!       Let’s eat Grandpa!

Lynne Truss wrote a whole book on the subject and garnered her title from this example:

The Panda eats shoots and leaves.

The Panda eats, shoots, and leaves. 

Sam Scheibner saw this sign in Fremont, WA, and sent it to the website Boing Boing:

DUMP NO MATERIAL WHATEVER

This of course cried out for some creative punctuation:

DUMP NO MATERIAL? WHATEVER ... 

Used correctly, punctuation can bestow power. Consider this sentence without internal punctuation:

A woman without her man is nothing.

But pop in a colon and a comma, and the meaning changes considerably: 

A woman: without her, man is nothing. 

So, you see, if you can laugh at punctuation, police blotters, and even death, you can find humor in just about anything. If you look for it hard enough. And sometimes even if you don’t.