In Natsume Soseki's feline autohagiographical comedy, that predates a certain other plump cat's self-musings, "I am a Cat" (Wagahai wa Neko de aru), his owner a writer and a friend are discussing a funny episode that their common friend had at a restaurant.
Kangetsu, the friend - being a cosmopolitan-minded man - fools the waiter that's serving them into believing that there exists an exotic dish called the "tochimenbou" (とちめんぼう), itself literally referring to a roll-pin used in making certain noodles:
The joke is here that the word for the genre of comedy is derived a literal stick that you slap with and Natsume uses a word for a Japanese roll pin that's used to flattened noodles, hence, the waiter is getting confused over Kangetsu constantly playing the prank on him by pretending that it's the name of an exotic food, rather than literally being the punchline for a slapstick joke.
Hence, translating this joke as well as pun requires quite a bit of cross-linguistic-cultural handiwork. Essentially boiling down to:
Slapstick -> Stick that you slap/roll with -> Exotic food with the same name
This train of thought as well as translation-creativity seems to be rather difficult for some translators:
Ito and Wilson's translation renders this with "moat-bell" and "meat-ball", where the former is the fictional food and the latter is the food that the poor waiter thinks that his guests want.
Unfortunately, this completely misses the point with the joke being a pun on slapstick comedy and instead merely convey's Kangestsu's facetious ridicule of him.
Other translations entirely forego this and either explain the literal word or annotate it, which certainly is a workable solution even though it breaks the flow of the story's comedy with the intrusion of an intertextual comment.