Craptions - The top 10 crappiest puns in the October edition of Snowboarder Magazine

It's sometimes said that puns are the lowest form of humour, but for years I've argued that the dubious honour should actually go to the likes of anagrams, pranks, mother-in-law jokes, slapstick and Garfield. At least that's what I believed before I picked up the October edition of Snowboarder Magazine on my last trip to the US. Here are the ten lowest points, in a new low point, for the now proven lowest form of humour...

In the October edition of Snowboarder Magazine there were an incredible 72 puns and over 90% in the photos on the magazine had been embossed with one. Given that they churn out 8 editions and it probably takes about 10 minutes to craft, edit and format each pun; that's 5,760 minutes, or 96 hours, or 12 working days Snowboarder Magazine dedicates to punning each season. Was that a good use of time? You decide.

1.

Sam Taxwood showed up to Big Bear thinking the name of our event was The Lunch so he ate a bunch of airtime and tried to avoid the dreaded knuckle sandwich. Turns out it's called The Launch.

You know what's better than Masthead? Road head, You know what's better then road head? Sled head.

Relying on hiking for all of your filmed documentaries is way more impressive when you're a big mountain rider like Jeremy Jones, as opposed to being a small mountain rider where the hikes are much, much shorter.

It's so vain to want to spend your whole winter being filmed all of the time. Oh, wait. It's Sylvain who wants to spend the winter being filmed all of the time. Sylvain Bourbousson! That's it!

After this photo ran. Devun would "Seymour" of the world traveling [sic] as a big time pro.

Bryan Fox with a "/" and Curtis Ciszek with a "\". Get it?

6a.
The same pun, the same magazine and the same snowboarder.

If this photo were a URL, the best part about it would be the backside slash.

Dare we say that this is a photo of JD Dennis doing a frontside "tree?".

Right after this photo of Zander Blackmon was snapped, SNOWBOARDER Magazine Senior Photographer Ethan "E-Stone" Fortier had a snack attack and tried to eat the Bear claw on the left side of the photo. Needless to say, it did't end well.

This photo of Austin Hironaka probably helped photographer Jeff Hawe emerge from the forest with a heightened appreciation of wood. Jeff wrote that.

10.

From the looks of the logo in the background, you'd think that SNOWBOARDER Magazine was kinda square, but you'd be wrong.

No. From the unremitting plethora of weak puns I'd assume Snowboarder Magazine is kinda square.

On the plus side and just to prove that if you throw enough shit at a wall some of it will stick, on page 121 we found a good one. Together with the other two good captions that made a hit ratio of 4%...

What's the coolest part about Further? The fact that parents and kids across the world can sit down and watch a skin flick together.

Dear Snowboarder Magazine Head of Pun Creation,

Here are a few handy tips on pun and caption writing that are worth considering for the rest of the season:

There's no need to reference the photo in the caption. We get the fact that the text on the photo has something to do with the photo.
Drop the speech marks and exclamation marks. They make you sound like an over-excited hipster.
Put the punch at the end if possible. That's where twists live. If you have to keep explaining a joke after the joke, the joke wasn't funny.
If your're tempted to start with the phrase 'dare we say' smash yourself in the face until the thoughts go away. In general if you need to spend a paragraph explaining or setting-up your pun the pun just ain't gonna happen.
There's no need to use the phrase 'Get it?'. We do.
Only do the funny ones. You don't need to force a pun each and every shot and there's only so many funny things you can say about a picture of snow. Try cutting down to 15 good puns and leave the rest. Every picture tells a thousand words, and that's an editorial time-saver my friend Use it.
Finally, on a positive note, don't give up. It is possible to write a good pun. There's a free magazine in the UK called Shortlist that do it horribly well. I picked on up the other day at the London Ski and Snowboard Show and here's the hardest caption competition I've ever seen...