Mirth and Evaluation of English Wordplays: Readers’ Perception of Bilingual Puns in Indonesia

English has been mixed with other languages to create bilingual puns. Many studies on puns include a second-order (language-observer) assessment, leading to amusement evaluations. This article combines first-order (language user) and second-order understandings, which leads to the discussion of successful and failed humour. Some studies also relate humour to gender; this study narrows the discussion to the factors that trigger failed humour across genders. It also scrutinizes the roles of English and its metalinguistic aspects in creating the fun of English wordplays, involving Bahasa Indonesia (BI) and the Javanese language (JL). This study collected thirteen bilingual puns and eliminated three of them. The puns were collected through field and virtual observation. Other data were readers’ perceptions of the puns, collected using questionnaires. The readers’ perceptions were analyzed using descriptive quantitative statistics combined with metalinguistic facts of the bilingual puns. This study finds that English gives double surprises to create amusement through the incongruity of detection and resolution. It can also attract readers’ initial interest because of its ‘high’ status. However, sensitive topics and evaluation of impoliteness can be factors of failed humour inside and across gender. The findings can affect the general definition of puns, which stereotypically relate double meanings to create amusement. However, the effects of ambiguous meaning are contested among readers, spanning from successful to failed humour. Furthermore, the perceived effects of humour are affected by local metalinguistic factors.