Imagine a kingdom postponing its coronation because the future monarch keeps disappearing. Eventually, the exhausted royal clerk asks whether everyone might take a “reign check.” There is your feghoot, provided the writer has earned that last ridiculous phrase. The joke is inevitable only after the story has persuaded us to follow along.

A feghoot is a short comic story that ends with a pun, often a pun that is a clever revision of a well-known phrase. The name of the genre derives from the wandering hero of Reginald Bretnor's short stories, which were published from 1956 onward under the pen name Grendel Briarton. Feghoot's journey took him through odd locales to arrive at a spectacularly strained verbal payoff. Readers came for the adventure, even while knowing some linguistic mischief awaited them.

That last pun is what sets the form apart from an everyday comic story. A comic character can go for laughs on the way to the ending without any feghoot. And an unexpected ending by itself will not have the necessary effect. For the words at the end to work, the audience must perceive them as a phrase they know but in which some part is out of place so that everything that has happened suddenly seems to have been specifically prepared to lead to that point.

This is the best start: write the ending first. Select a predictable phrase that can be made to have another meaning with a simple sound change. Imagine a biologist on a spaceship opening a laboratory that hasn't been accessed for weeks and finding a pot of thyme in the corner. Its label bears her own handwriting and tomorrow's date, and the video camera shows the pot suddenly forming on an empty shelf.

Provide a motive for her to look deeper than simple curiosity. The captain has reason to believe an intruder has gotten into the ship. On the date shown on the label, she leaves an identical pot, which disappears immediately. Asked for her diagnosis, she calls the incident “thyme travel.”

A feghoot comes into its own when the characters are truly invested in what is happening. When everyone is aware that they are in on a great joke, you may be anticipating the punch line rather than enjoying the story. The more earnest the botanist is worried about the crew, the better her silly story will be!

Length is important because the punchline must justify the reader's effort. Let each scene naturally build toward the final text. A diversion is fitting only if it improves the gotcha quality of the end. Even the most absurd situations need an explanation that conforms to its rules. Ease the reader in with the start and surprise them with the ending.

Try reading the last sentence aloud after completing a draft. If listeners need an explanation, the wording may be too obscure. If they predict the ending immediately, the setup may be announcing its intentions too loudly. Revision is about adjusting how much the audience knows before the final reveal.

A feghoot invites writers to practice an unusual kind of discipline. Build the world convincingly enough to support a terrible pun, then deliver that pun with a perfectly straight face. Congratulations, your work is officially pun and done.