Making the cut

Punniest business names and triple puns

If you walk down The Cut near Waterloo there is a hairdressers called Making the Cut. That’s not just a pun, that’s a triple pun. It uses three distinct meanings of cut and three distinct meanings of making. Carrying out the hair-cut, being the making of The Cut i.e. The Cut has made it thanks to this hairdresser, and making the cut i.e. getting into the top half and by extension (see I’m doing it now) being successful. It’s not exactly funny, but it’s very impressive.

It’s not quite enough to make me go in there - I have my own strange, silent Turkish barber as I have explained before - see Inarticulate male at the barber’s. There’s a small chance that this barber may be some latter-day Oscar Wilde character, regaling me with brilliant triple puns throughout the haircut, but it’s more likely that he will be a poet or comedian manqué and a very indifferent hairdresser, or else he’s a sullen employee of his wordsmith boss and violently fed up with having to talk about triple puns with idiots like me. So I’ve admired Making the Cut from a distance.

It got me thinking about other triple puns, but there are remarkably few. Rush’s album cover Moving Pictures is a visual example - removal men are transporting paintings while people become emotional looking at them, and a film crew shoots the scene. Clever but not funny.

And other puns purporting to be triple puns are really just three homonyms strung together, like the boys setting up a cattle ranch asking their mum for a name for the ranch and she says “Focus - where the sons raise meat. (sun’s rays meet). Meh. Now if one of them was called Ray and he liked to sunbathe in the nude (suns Ray’s meat) then we might be approaching credible triple pun territory. Likewise the prize-winning farmer who was out standing in his field. Now make him a cricketer who was dismissed when nowhere near his crease and we might be getting somewhere.

Despite some social media blithering in its favour, this one below is not really a triple pun is it? Full marks for effort but you get the feeling you would not really like to meet this person:

Some pop songs use triple wordplay - most surprisingly, Slade had a go in Merry Christmas Everybody: Do you ride on down the hillside, In a buggy you have made
And land upon your head, then you been slayed/sleighed/Slade? And in Cream, Prince says “You got the horn so why don’t you blow it?”, which struggles over the line as a triple pun: a literal meaning, a sexual innuendo and an exhortation to self-promote.

Here’s another triple entendre from Prince (Hans), to Anna in Frozen, as he literally catches her as she falls, but also manages to see her before she leaves and to ensnare her in his trap.

Sticking with royalty, we should probably leave the last word to Shakespeare, and the famous opening lines of Richard III contain a triple pun: Now is the winter of our discontent, Made glorious summer by this sun of York. Richard is referring to Edward IV, the first Yorkist king, and son of the Duke of York. So he’s a metaphorical sun turning winter to summer, and he’s a son, and the heraldic badge of the house of York was a sun. And Much ado about nothing was also apparently a triple pun which we would have no idea about nowadays - nothing in its literal sense, but also close to “noting” which at the time meant gossip and rumour, a theme of the play. And nothing (or O-thing) was also Elizabethan slang for the vulva. Trust Shakespeare to lower the tone.

So Making the Cut soars in the rarefied air of the triple pun exosphere, but is also jostling with the joke names in the more crowded airspace of the business punosphere. How does it compare? Well, hairdressers have often been a cut above, with names like Hairway to Heaven, Hair Raid Shelter, Trim Reaper, Jack the Clipper, Scissor Me Timbers, Chop It Like It's Hot, Hair Force One and Barber Streisand.

But in the Pun-ger Games, hairdressers get battered by fish and chip shops, the punniest businesses on the high street: The Codfather, Frying Nemo, New Cod on the Block, A Salt & Battery, Jack the Chipper, Codrophenia, The Frying Scotsman, Oh My Cod, The Rock n Sole Plaice, Cod Almighty, The Star Chip Enterprise, the Cod’s Pollocks. And this one:

Sadly, Not tonight, I Have a Haddock and The chips don’t lie don’t appear to have been taken yet.

There’s actually a competition for funniest small business names, with a rather measly £2,500 prize put up by Simply Business. There have been some strong entries, especially in the street food sector - Tikka chance on me, Jason Donervan, Doner Summer and Taco Look at Me Now. There has also been the Puff Dad E vape shop, Spruce Springclean carpet cleaners, Surelock Holmes locksmiths (the 2024 winner), Perky Blenders (coffee roasters - the 2022 winner), William the Concreter, the Kilning me softly pottery cafe and Samuel ‘L’ Jackson a driving instructor in Southport (who really is called Sam Jackson and got a call from the Hollywood star who jokingly called him a “cheeky motherf******”) .

The 2025 competition was won by Glaswegian DIY shop Dae-it-yersel (meh) which beat off superior competition (in my view) from gardeners Back to the Fuchsia and Lawn and Order and clothes shop Damsel in This Dress.

Making the Cut was not, in this instance, making the cut, but it’s surely the cleverest business name. And probably the only triple-pun business name in the country.

Looking forward to hearing of any others in the comments.