Mary Christmas

[pne]

A joke I like goes like this:

Q: What’s Santa Claus’s wife’s name?

A: Mary Christmas!

Recently, it struck me that that joke might work even better in those parts of the US that pronounce Merry and Mary identically.

But on second thoughts, I wonder whether it might not be better if the speaker does not have the merger, because then the pun is a bit clearer: it doesn’t sound as if the answer is merely “Merry Christmas” but you explicitly point at the given name “Mary”.

I’m still not sure which kind of accent (merging or non-merging) would be more effective for this pun.