What do you get when you cross a supermarket with a jungle?

You get checkout lions! In the fruit aisle you can find orange-utangs. Go to the snack aisle and you can get great monkey bars, too.

The answer to this joke uses the word "lions" as a pun for the word "lines". Puns are a type of joke that use words that have one or more meanings or that sound similar to each other. In this joke, the supermarket has checkout lines where customers wait to pay for their items, and the word "lines" sounds similar to "lions," which are large cats that live in the jungle.

Puns have been used throughout literature. The famous playwright William Shakespeare used many puns in his plays and sonnets both as jokes and to give richer meaning to his character's dialogue.