The performance and recognition of the act of putting people on involves an awareness and use not only of aspects of the communicative process that hold for all face-to-face interaction, but also of culturally acquired aspects of communication. Teasing and punning are varieties of communicative acts that involve the use of the put-on to accomplish their ends. They seem also to involve a kind of relatedness between verbal and nonverbal communicative acts that is not usually acknowledged, suggesting that the same act can be accomplished through either mode or through a combination of both, and raising the possibility that this may be true of some speech acts or genres. More generally, this paper argues for an interactional approach to the analysis of punning and teasing, so as to include both the efforts of the instigator of the act and those with whom he is interacting. Finally, it is recommended that nonliteral or nonserious communicative acts make more sense when considered in relationship to the literal formulations on which they depend, and that examination of nonliteral uses can in turn contribute to our understanding of the literal usage of both verbal and nonverbal modes of communication. (Author/DB)