Towards a model of story puns

There is a class of joke which consists of an anecdote, which is sometimes quite long and often has no inherently humorous content, followed by, a fin al line which is a distorted form of some well-known phrase, proverb or quo tation. Usually this final line purports to summarize or draw a moral from the preceding story. This genre has some unusual aspects, from the viewpoin t of conventional claims about the attributes of jokes. These jokes also ha ve certain structural or formal regularities, which suggest that it might b e possible to define a computational model of their production. We outline how this might he done, by decomposing the construction of such story puns into a sequence of stages; some of these are clearly manageable, others are less straightforward. We also make some observations about where such an e ndeavor would fit within the broader field of humor research.