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Comment by SoftTalker | Hacker News Reader

> I have never met a captain who will depart if they are not absolutely positive about the stability of their ship

Guess you have not dealt with air freight pilots in the third world or bush country?

I had interpreted the GP as specifically talking about maritime captains, which I imagine could be a very different boat (pardon the pun).

Can someone please explain why native English speakers always feel the need to indicate and express the pun? Literally every single time I see “pun intended” or “no pun intended” I stop for a while and try to understand why the author felt the need to wrie that.

If they weren't joking they'd say "No fun intended" but they are joking (and meta-joking that they aren't joking).

I assume "fun" should read "pun"—but this new version is funny too :-P

Often times you can increase the humor by calling attention to the joke, even if the joke is already obvious. Puns in particular seem (at least to me) to get funnier the longer you think about them so prompting the reader to think about them longer can have positive effects.

> you can increase the humor by calling attention to the joke

My opinion is that ruins everything. Just like those american comedies where the virtual audience laughs like goats.

Yeah, i think most people agree about laughtracks these days. Well, i hope cause i hate it too. But i think the pun thing is mostly just culturally translated. I think if you asked most people why, some would have a vague idea that it might be more funny but i bet the number of people that could give a plausible reason would be very small. People do it in hacky comedies so that they can place a pause and a laugh track to force the audience to laugh. A lot of humor is socially constructed and our own sense of what is funny is certainly no where near the same across the globe. I think sitcom TV culture has influenced us Americans in many ways, including how we handle puns in speech.

Most people think of it as camaraderie, like I'm nudging you into the joke with me

Sometimes we say puns on purpose, and sometimes we realize what we're saying is a pun as we're saying it, so we often distinguish which is which.

In interpret both as "don't miss the pun".

Or that's why they wanted the check. They felt like it was a noticable problem so they got someone to look

I doubt air freight pilots would live long if they didn't pay attention to weight distribution and the weight being properly secured.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Airlines_Flight_102 for a rather drastic example.

They don't: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Pakistan_Internationa...

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