Too Punny

Years ago, some Serbian girls who'd
migrated to Australia decided to set up a sandwich shop in Canberra and call it 'Rolls Choice'. The name they'd selected struck me immediately as the kind of play on words that no native English speaker would ever consider. Okay, the thing rhymes with Rolls Royce, and the shop sold rolls as well as slices of bread with fillings, but the association between cars and food was a dodgy one and, in any case, the phrase 'Rolls Choice' didn't make proper sense.

Needless to say, the business was a great success, which doesn't change my view that 'Rolls Choice' is a name that only a foreigner could imagine was clever. Mind you, it isn't the only example. All over the world there are establishments with supposedly jokey names that - to a native speaker (or at least to this native speaker) - sound really clunky.

Budapest is no exception. It has its fair share of businesses where the owners have made cackhanded attempts to be funny at the expense of the long-suffering English language. There is the pasta restaurant that calls itself  'Eataliano'. There is this solarium, called 'Sunbody', oh, haha haha:

There is this shop, which I suppose is honest, in the sense that the only thing one can say about it is that - at least in name - it is very peculiar:

There is this new establishment, which appears to be a combined butcher-cum-cafe arrangement, where you can meet for meat (geddit? Side-splitting, if not exactly tantalisingly mouthwatering):

A very similar logo, oddly enough, appears on this box, which contains something mysterious for Hungarian men, (the POTE is a play, I think, on potency, nuf sed):

A slightly more successful attempt at fooling around with our language - although one that I'd have thought would have fallen flat in the Hungarian market, given that the Hungarian word for nose is 'orr' - is this nasal spray or inhaler, which is called, rather sweetly, I must admit, 'Nozi':

The name of this children's shop, on the other hand, is merely baffling: could it possibly be that someone thinks that somehow they are making a so-called joke out of slightly altering the babble-word 'goo goo':

Ridiculous though they are, in a way I can't help admiring the confidence of the authors behind these various attempts at hilarity. I've never been brave enough to attempt humour in a foreign language, partly because I've never  forgotten the advice an American friend married to an Austrian was given by her children before every parent-teacher night at their German speaking school: 'Whatever you do, mum,' they would always beg her, 'please, please don't try to make a joke.'