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{{quote|'''Sally Sparrow:''' ''We should [[They Fight Crime|set up an agency.]]'' <br />
'''Kathy Nightingale:''' ''[[Theme Naming|Sparrow and Nightingale]]! That '''so''' works!'' <br />
'''Sally Sparrow:''' ''I dunno. It's [[Take That|a bit]] [[ITV]].''|''[[Doctor Who]]'', "[[Doctor Who
TV networks have an unsettling habit of giving their shows titles which rely on puns on the lead character's name -- particularly if the character's name reflects the premise and/or theme of the show. For example, in a TV series named ''Swift Justice'' you can pretty much bet that our hero will be named something like "Jane Justice" or "John Swift" (or, Heaven help us, Federal District Court Judge "Justice Alice Swift").
This is most common in the United Kingdom, but still happens elsewhere.
In the United States, puns are more popular for [[Idiosyncratic Episode Naming|titles of individual episodes]]. See ''[[Knight Rider]]'', ''[[Airwolf]]'' and ''[[Remington Steele]]''. Also, see many animated series for individual episode title examples. See [[Punny Name]] for characters; also compare [[Justified Title]].
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* ''[[State Of Grace]]'', a Fox Family show about the friendship of 12-year-olds Hannah (who is Christian) and Grace (who is Jewish).
* ''[[Grace Under Fire]]'', sitcom about a woman named Grace Kelly, surviving "under fire" from the hassles of being a single mother, a recovering alcoholic and blue collar in modern America.
* ''[[Saving Grace]]'' [[Running Gag|is about a woman named Grace]] who gets a "last chance angel" (named Earl) who's trying to save her from going to hell because she drinks and boinks a lot.
* ''[[Will and Grace]]'', about roommates named... something or other.
* ''[[Grey's Anatomy]]'', a medical drama named after the main character Doctor Meredith Grey and after a classic mid-19th-century medical book, ''Gray's Anatomy''. Just be thankful they didn't call it Grace Anatomy.
* ''[[Tru Calling]]'', a drama about Tru Davies, who receives the "calling", an injunction to [[Set Right What Once Went Wrong]].
* ''[[Hope And Faith]]'', about two sisters by those names.
* ''[[Joan of Arcadia]]''
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* ''[[Crossing Jordan]]''
* A blissfully short-lived series called ''Sunday in Paris''. Sunday was the main character, and Paris was the one in Texas.
* The short lived, early-90s show ''Mann & Machine" featured a futuristic detective named Mann [[Robots And Detectives|and his robot partner]] (played by Yancy Butler).
* [[Saturday Night Live]] had a sketch featuring a game show parody called "What is ''[[Burn Notice]]''?" The contestants had no idea, and one of the wrong answers was a guess that it was "about the detective team of Michael Burn and Chet Notice."
* One episode of ''[[Married... with Children]]'' saw a network making a TV show based off of the Bundy family; the show was titled "Pease in a Pod". No points for guessing the family's name.
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* ''Hokuto no Ken'', the Japanese title of ''[[Fist of the North Star]]'', can be interpreted as both, a reference to the martial art style ''Hokuto Shinken'' (the "Hokuto Divine Fist") or the main character himself, Kenshiro (who is nicknamed Ken, as in "Ken of Hokuto").
** The important word here is "Ken", which translates to "Fist".
* Arguably ''[[Darker
* The Japanese for ''[[Hayate the Combat Butler]]'', ''Hayate No Gotoku,'' literally means ''Just Like the Hurricane!''--but, well, the hero's name is Hayate Ayasaki, and the first name [[Meaningful Name|just means that]].
* ''[[Maria Holic]]''. In this case, "Maria" refers to the Virgin Mary and therefore its Catholic girls' school setting, but sounds ''very'' similar to Mariya, the name of one of the show's central characters and [[Villainous Crossdresser]], on whom the heroine has a crush.
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* ''[[Heroic Age]]'' - the main character is named Age, and he is heroic. Simultaneously a reference to the "heroic age" of [[Greek Mythology]], which the series references heavily.
* ''[[Tantei Gakuen Q]]'' is about the "Qualified" class of a school for detectives. The main character just happens to be named Kyu.
* ''[[Audio Adaptation|StrikerS Sound Stage X]]''. The X that initially appeared to just be a way to differentiate this from the standard ''[[Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha]]'' Sound Stages (which are numbered 1-4 and are simply side-stories to the current season, unlike X which is a completely new [[Story Arc]]) turned out to also refer to the [[Mysterious Waif]] named Ikusu, whose name is transcribed to romaji in the CD booklet as X.
* ''[[Urusei Yatsura]]'' is a pun on ''urusai'', meaning noisy or annoying in Japanese, instead spelling it with 星 (sei) which means star or planet. So the title can only be loosely translated, to something like "Those Obnoxious Aliens" or "Annoying Star Dudes" or even "Guys from the Planet Uru". Of course, the main character is [[Born Unlucky|Moroboshi Ataru]], which literally means "hit by a falling star", so the title is only the beginning of the [[Hurricane of Puns]].
* A manga by Toshiki Yui titled ''[[Kagome Kagome]]'' has two characters named Kagome; its title is also the name of a [[wikipedia:Kagome Kagome|Japanese children's game]].
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* Every even-numbered novel and most of the anthologies in the main universe ''[[Honor Harrington]]'' novels have a pun on the name 'honor' somewhere in their titles. One wonders whether the reason the next novel isn't due out for a long time is that the author finally ran out of puns.
* Every book in Robert Asprin's ''[[Phule's Company]]'' series is a pun on the main character's surname, which is... [[Captain Obvious|Phule]]. Hence ''Phule's Paradise'', ''A Phule And His Money'', ''Phule's Errand''...
** His ''[[Myth Inc]]'' series had similarly punny titles - some off ''missing'' and some off ''mythic''.
*** The sole exception being the first novel, "Another Fine Myth", which was a pun off "Another Fine Mess". In actuality the title had been approved and solicited before the author had come up with a better pun, and he just kind of had to leave it that way.
* [[Lois McMaster Bujold]] claims that several of her [[Vorkosigan Saga|Miles Vorkosigan]] books have had ''Miles to Go'' as a working title, but she's always come up with something better before publication.
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== Video Games ==
* ''[[The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past]]'': The main character is named Link; he has to deal with the consequences of the past of Hyrule.
* ''X-Men: Mutant Apocalypse'': the game centers around a mutant apocalypse which involves one of the X-Men's adversary, an evil mutant named Apocalypse.
* ''[[Will Rock]]'': main character? Willford Rockwell.
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