Richard Lederer - Get Thee to a Punnery: An Anthology of Intentional Assaults Upon the English Language

In the arrangement of the twenty-five games in this book there is method to the madness, as well as madness in the method. After the first chapters on the pervasive punnery in our lives come several games involving punnish signs and license plates that we see all around us. Next appears A Primer of Puns, followed by games that play with the three major types of pun-makinghomographs, homophones, and double-sound puns. This basic taxonomy is solidified by an extensive test of the readers punupmanship.

There follows another cluster of games progressing from single-sound puns, such as Have You Ever Seen a Horse Fly?, to double-sound puns, such as Anguish Languish. Then the book closes with two more types of punnerymeld puns and spoonerismsand a generous round of set-up puns that reviews all the methods presented in the first nineteen chapters.

Any good game consists of items of varying levels of difficulty. Some of the punning posers are likely to stump you the first time around, but you will find that insights into the more challenging questions will come to you in sudden flashes when you return to the games a second and third time.

When you are sure that you have reached your limit, turn to the back of the book, where answers to all the games repose.

Believe it or not, early in January of each year America celebrates National Save the Pun Week. About this occasion Dan Carlinsky has observed, Most folks will probably think that celebrating the pun is about as worthwhile as celebrating a hangnail or a full garbage pail. The pun is the most misunderstood and most beset-upon form of humor.

I have written this book to sweep away all misunderstandings about the crafty art of punnery and to convince you that the pun is well worth celebratingall year round. After all, the pun is mightier than the sword, and these days you are much more likely to run into a pun than into a sword.

Scoffing at puns seems to be a conditioned reflex, and through the centuries a steady barrage of libel and slander has been aimed at the practice of punning. Nearly three hundred years ago John Dennis sneered, A pun is the lowest form of wit, a charge that has been butted and rebutted by a mighty line of pundits and punheads.

Henry Erskine, for example, has protested that if a pun is the lowest form of wit, it is, therefore, the foundation of all wit. Oscar Levant has added a tagline: A pun is the lowest form of humorwhen you dont think of it first. John Crosbie and Bob Davies have responded to Dennis with hot, cross puns: The pun has been said to be the lowest form of humusearthy wit that everyone digs and If someone complains that punning is the lowest form of humor, you can tell them that poetry is verse.

Samuel Johnson, the eighteenth century self-appointed custodian of the English language, once thundered, To trifle with the vocabulary which is the vehicle of social intercourse is to tamper with the currency of human intelligence. He who would violate the sanctities of his Mother Tongue would invade the recesses of the national till without remorse.

If language is money and language manipulators are thieves, Doctor Johnson was a felon, for to him is attributed the following:

Thus proving the truth of Joseph Addisons pronouncement: The seeds of Punning are in the minds of all men, and tho they may be subdued by Reason, Reflection, and good Sense, they will be very apt to shoot up in the greatest Genius, that is not broken and cultivated by the rules of Art.

Far from being invertebrate, the inveterate punster is a brave entertainer. He or she loves to create a three-ring circus of words: words clowning, words teetering on tightropes, words swinging from tent tops, words thrusting their heads into the mouths of lions. Punnery can be highly entertaining, but it is always a risky business. The humor can fall on its face, it can lose its balance and plunge into the sawdust, or it can be decapitated by the snapping shut of jaws.

While circus performers often receive laughter or applause for their efforts, punsters often draw an obligatory groan for theirs. But the fact that most people groan at rather than laugh at puns doesnt mean that the punnery isnt funnery. If the pun is a good one, the groan usually signifies a kind of suppressed admiration for the verbal acrobatics on display, and perhaps a hidden envy.

Edgar Allan Poe (of all people) neatly (and ravenously?) summed up the situation when he wrote, with all his tell-tale heart, Of puns it has been said that those most dislike who are least able to utter them. Almost a century later, Henry Fowler, in his Dictionary of Modem English Usage, expanded on Poes insight: The assumption that puns are per se contemptible, betrayed by the habit of describing every pun not as a pun, but as a bad pun or a feeble pun, is a sign at once of sheepish docility and a desire to seem superior. Puns are good, bad, and indifferent, and only those who lack the wit to make them are unaware of the fact.