PSA: If you say the pun out loud before the punchline, you already killed it
I bombed a joke at my brother's cookout in Toledo last month because I said the word 'lettuce' about four times before I got to the actual punchline about the salad. My uncle just stared at me and said 'you gave it away, Vic.' The trick is you bury the pun word at the end so nobody sees it coming, and that bit about pausing for effect only works if the pause is short. I have been telling these at the shop for 11 years and the guys still groan, but they groan at the right spot now. What's the one setup word you always catch yourself spoiling before the punch lands?
The word that gets me is "bar." I'll be two sentences into some bit about a guy walking into a place and I hear myself say "so he goes up to the bar" and I know right then the whole thing is dead, because every person at that table just thought of the same pun at the same time. Now I try to say "the counter" or "the front desk" so the pun word only shows up once, at the very end, where it belongs. Same thing happens with "hair" if I'm not careful. The setup has to be boring on purpose so the last word hits like a truck.