Trigger-Happy Pandas: Never Boring

A few years back, I ran across a little book called "Eats, Shoots and Leaves", which was titled after the old joke that goes a little something like this:

A panda walks into a restaurant, sits down and enjoys a meal. After picking up the check, he stands up, pulls out a gun, fires a round into the ceiling, and walks out. The patrons are understandably upset, but the staff attempt to calm everyone down. "That's normal panda behavior," a waiter says. "He eats, shoots and leaves."

HAHA! Oh, that's good! The entire premise of the book is, of course, about punctuation. The punchline depends on the fact that if the comma is removed from the waiter's comment, an undeniable fact becomes apparent. A panda's diet is composed mostly of the shoots and leaves of the bamboo plant (cue mute trumpet: "wanh-wanh-wannnnnh").

I do so love wordplay of this nature, and I'll share with you my personal favorite sentence in this form, "Hide the cows outside." In this form, it's a demand to hide the bovine animals in a location exterior to where you are currently located. However, the simple addition of a comma, an apostrophe and an exclamation point yields: "Hide, the cow's outside!" a sentence that conjures up a terrifying image of a cow possessed, an animal who has had enough and intends to do something about it (and of course, the petrified inhabitants of the house, equally funny). There are many sentences that share two definitions based on punctuation placement, but this one is my favorite, for there is a third meaning to it: "Hide: the cow's outside." Indeed, the outside of a cow is called "hide".

After doing some searching online, I came across this BBC article/contest that asks the reader to draft a whole letter that has two entirely different meanings. This is much harder than you think (I like the last one best).

P.S.: I was watching Predator last night, and about halfway through I realized it was actually Beowulf (the poem, not the film). Think about it.