Funny Business Names

The six devices

Every row above uses one of these, and most use only one. Naming the device is useful because it tells you what to search for in your own trade vocabulary:

A seventh trick is not a device but a pivot: one word that belongs to both halves at once. Custard's Last Stand works because a stand is a battle position and a kiosk, and Shear Madness works because shear is the cut and sheer is the intensifier. A straight name from the business name generator gives you the trade words to test a pivot against.

Eight names, taken apart

The mechanism is the same at every scale. Eight spotlights, one from each corner of the list:

Which trades carry a joke well

The ones customers walk past, talk about, and revisit cheaply. Chip shops, salons, barbers, cafes, pet groomers, market stalls, record shops and food trucks. In those trades the name is doing advertising work on a street, and a pun is a cheap way to be remembered by someone who was not looking. The cost is small because the purchase is small.

The trades that carry it badly are the ones where the customer is anxious or the invoice is large: surgeons, solicitors, funeral directors, structural engineers, accountants. There the name has to promise competence, and a joke spends the promise before the work starts. A middle route exists, and it is the common one: register a straight legal name, then trade under the pun. Build the straight half on the business name generator and keep the joke for the sign.

The practical costs of a pun

Three, and all three are fixable. Spelling is the first: a respelled name has to be dictated over the phone, so Plaice and Kreme and Surelock all cost their owners a sentence every time. Search is the second, because a name that puns on a film title competes with the film for the query, and Planet of the Grapes will never outrank Planet of the Apes. Ageing is the third: a joke pinned to a 1994 sitcom or a 1980s band ages with it, while a joke pinned to an idiom does not.

The fix for all three is the same. Keep the trade word intact and legible inside the joke, so the name still says what you sell when the reference fades. For the softer register, cute business names run their own documented devices, and the invented-word approach sits on creative business names.