We have implemented a simple model of puns in a program (BOKE) which generates puns in Japanese, using linguistic information from a general-purpose lexicon. Our rough evaluation indicates that the puns generated by the program are of comparable quality to those generated by humans. BOKE differs from an earlier English-language system (JAPE) only in the lexicon and the templates used to generate the surface text-the punning mechanisms are the same. This suggests that our model of puns is language independent.