Richard Lederer - Puns Spooken Here: Word Play for Halloween

To Stan Kegel, a true servant of punnery.

You may well have heard the seasonal prey upon words What do you call an empty hot dog? Answer: A hollow weenie. But you may not have realized how capacious is the tricky treat bag of Halloween puns.

Theres something about the lore of Halloween that inspires tour de farces at the highest level of punnery. What this book will offer you is a veritable Bill of Frights. Punnery is largely the trick of compacting two or more ideas within a single word or expression. Punnery challenges us to apply the greatest pressure per square syllable of language. Punnery surprises us by flouting the law of nature that pretends that two things cannot occupy the same space at the same time. Punnery is an exercise of the mind at being concise.

Punnery is a rewording experience.

Lets start by cooking up a punderful menu for Halloween. I know you wont be able to resist goblin up this full-corpse meal. Bone appetit! Ghost Toasties Scream of Wheat Pentagram Crackers Brain Muffins with Poisonbury Jam Hungarian Ghoul Ash Frank n Stein Halloweenie Black Catfish Stake Sandwitch Littleneck Clams Warlocks and Bagels Grave-y with Scream Cheese Spook-ghetti Deviled Eggs Artichoke Skullions Scarrots Ghost Liver Pat Adams Apples Nectarines I Scream Boobury Pie Boo Meringue Ghoul Whip Terrormisu Ladyfingers Ghoulda Cheese Monster Cheese Ghoul Aid Coffin with Scream Zombie Apple Spider What do you get when you drop a pumpkin? Squash. Whats the favorite food of mathematicians? Pumpkin pi. How can you help a Jack-o-lantern stop smoking? Make him wear a pumpkin patch. What do you call a yokel living on a farm? A country pumpkin. How do predatory canines find their way around at night? They carry jackal lanterns. How did Mr. Hyde celebrate Halloween? With a Jekyll lantern. In Ireland, celebrants of Halloween carved out the insides of turnips and lit them with embers to represent the souls of the dead. The Irish brought this custom with them to America, only replacing turnips with the more abundant pumpkins, which had been grown here for more than 5,000 years.

From pumpkins they began to create jack-o-lanterns, and the custom spread. The Irish tell a story about a notorious drunkard and trickster named Jack. He could not enter heaven because he was a miser, and he was unable to enter hell because he had played practical jokes on the devil. The devil gave him a single ember to light his way through the frigid darkness. Jack placed the hot coal inside a hollowed-out turnip to keep it glowing longer and was left to walk the earth until Judgment Day with his Jacks lantern. In honor of the seasonal pumpkin, lets celebrate some words that have one thing in common.

They all end with the letters K-I-N. Provide the missing letters for each word defined:

Halloween was brought to America in the 1840s by Irish immigrants fleeing their countrys potato famine. At that time, the favorite pranks in New England included tipping over outhouses and unhinging fence gates. According to the Dauphin County Library System, in 1921 Anoka, Minnesota, celebrated the first official city-wide observation of Halloween with carved pumpkins, a costumed square dance, and two parades. After that, it didnt take Halloween long to go nationwide. New York started celebrating in 1923 and Los Angeles in 1925.

The folklore of witches, ghosts, and cats in Halloween celebrations originates with the Druids. The Druids were an order of priests in ancient Gaul and Britain who believed that ghosts, spirits, fairies, witches, and elves came out on Halloween to harm people. They thought that cats had once been human beings but were changed as punishment for their evil deeds. Sharpen your pun cells now, and please join in some punnery about our favorite denizens of Halloween loreghosts, skeletons, witches, and monsters.

The spirited Halloween ball was a site for soirees. The spirit moved hundreds of specters from ghost to ghost to travel to the gala event.

The ghosts danced sheet to sheet to some haunting melodies and boo-gied into the night. When the band wasnt playing from its sheet music, the ghostly revelers sang scare-ee-okee. One of the apparitions was dressed in red and green. He was a Christmas wraith. Another came dressed up in a badly torn sheet. He was a holy terror.

The women wore mas-scare-a, and their children came dressed up in white pillowcases. Unfortunately, not a single skeleton attended the banquet. They had no body to go with, they didnt have the stomach for it, and they had no guts. A number of the ghosts raised their goblets of boos as ghost toasts to dampen the spirits. As they became increasingly drunk and disorderly, one of the specters observed, Just like when he was alive working as a bicycle mechanic, the bartender got the spooks too tight. Some of these high spirits made overtures to the females present to accompany them elsewhere.