Humor is a very subjective thing, and what causes one person to roll on the floor laughing another may find tedious. One of the best ways to create humor, especially if one is aiming to create something comedic or satiric rather than simply a pun, is through irony. Most light verse is formal in nature, in part because this often can be used by the poet to create a sense of self-awareness of what the poem is doing, and that it is a poem. Ideally, the formal nature of the poem can combine rhyme with a judicious use of puns, although one should try to avoid being too heavy-handed about punning with the rhyming words. There is a level at which the pun is the ideal form of poetic expression.
Poetry is a compression of language, and the movement in a poem is from idea to idea.
A well-crafted pun might accomplish this with a single word or phrase. In part, this depends on why you're writing light verse. And in part it depends on what you're writing about. I am going to split hairs, using the humorous works of various authors or genres as examples. I am about to make gross generalizations for the purposes of these analogies.