Prosody is what makes this joke funny.

Prosody, sometimes referred to as suprasegmental features, vocalics or paraverbal cues consists of all the attributes of sound that operate over stretches of speech larger than an individual vowel or consonant and convey meanings that have some measurable communication functions (Dalton & Seidlhofer, 2011). In the case of the joke above, the comma indicates a brief pause that is the key prosodic element that changes the meaning of the word ‘shoots.’ Prosody in language learning is crucial because vocal cues, including the rhythmic and melodic aspects of speech, convey meanings that cannot be gleaned from context and influence the intelligibility and production of segmentals (the individual sounds of a language) (Lantolf, 1976). Two forms of prosody are typically distinguished: ‘affective prosody’ refers to the expression of emotion in speech, and ‘linguistic prosody’ refers to the intonation of sentences, including the specification of focus within sentences and stress within polysyllabic words. Whereas these two processes are united by their use of vocal pitch modulation, they are functionally distinct (Belyk & Brown, 2014). Among the sound attributes that give our vocal behavior its unique characteristics are pauses, volume, intonation (the use of pitch), stress (the use of greater energy, greater length, or higher pitch), rhythm (stresses and syllable patterns), rate, and voice quality (the general long-term setting of vocal organs, counting the tongue and vocal cords) (Brown, 2014; Dalton & Seidlhofer, 2011). All of these prosodic elements work together to carry out communicative, affective and cognitive functions.