Week Bore the Highland For 'em
Nice snippet from the economist
Word battles
Puns in the sun
Revenge of the word nerds
May 27th 2010 | AUSTIN | From The Economist print edition
SOME people look down on puns. Others think their reputation has groan. But for Gary Hallock, they are a friendly and participatory form of humour. The audience has to make the connection, giving them a sense of delight, even of pride. The joke is on the language, not the listener.
Mr Hallock organises one of America’s big pun events, an annual pun-off at the O. Henry Museum in Austin, Texas. The writer O. Henry was famous for surprise endings, not wordplay, though a pun could be considered a surprise ending for a sentence. In any case, the contest has been running for more than 30 years, attracting dozens of competitors and whole hundreds of fans. The first part of the event, which is scripted, is for Punniest of Show. One man offered a topical routine: “Oil be damned.” The year’s winners, Kelly Dupen and Justin Golbabai, did a skit about meat and vegetables. “We both came into this relationship with a lot of personal cabbage,” said Ms Dupen. The second was an unprepared battle between punslingers.
A pun is not exactly subtle. “It is a pistol let off at the ear; not a feather to tickle the intellect,” wrote Charles Lamb, a British essayist. Michael West, a professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, explains that puns flourished in America in the 19th century. There was, at the time, a widespread belief that mass literacy would foster civic virtue. Noah Webster’s famous blue-backed spelling book sold tens of millions of copies; schoolchildren were drilled relentlessly in grammar and spelling. Puns may have acted as a kind of subversive relief for bored students.
That puts puns in contrast to, say, a riddle about how many psychiatrists it takes to screw in a light bulb. “You’re not expected to have an answer for that,” says Mr Hallock. “What you are is you are a dupe.” Where’s the pun in that?
