The Pun Also Rises

You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. Grant, you know what happens when a clock gets hungry?

I’m afraid to say yes or no. No, what?

It goes back four seconds.

That’s terrible!

I was waiting for that. I was waiting for that.

But puns are supposed to be terrible, right? A good pun’s not a pun. It’s a joke.

Yeah, I was…

You’ve been reading that book again.

I’ve been reading that book, The Pun Also Rises, and I bring up that silly joke because one of the points that John Pollock makes in this book, The Pun Also Rises, is the fact that throughout much of history, puns were actually a commonly accepted rhetorical tool.

Aristotle praised what he called semantic surprises like that, and Cicero called them the wittiest kind of saying.

And you remember your Shakespeare. I mean, he punned all the time. And a lot of the puns we don’t even get because we don’t pronounce English the same way. And he used them in serious and comical situations.

But I think you’ll find this interesting, Grant Pollack argues that something changed in the early 18th century.

Now, this was right about the time that rules about English grammar were being codified and put into books that people were looking to as a kind of manual for social proper behavior and advancement.

And this is when you start seeing pamphlets with titles like God’s Revenge Against Punning,

Showing the miserable fates of persons addicted to this crying sin in court and town.

Wait, were those genuine or were they satirical?

Well, they went back and forth.

You know, Jonathan Swift wrote things like that.

And Samuel Johnson called puns the last refuge of the witless.

Yeah, I’ve heard that one.

Yeah.

And then it goes on and on.

In the 19th century, Oliver Wendell Holmes.

You’re going to love this one.

Said a pun on its face is, quote, an insult to the person you are talking with.

It implies utter indifference to or sublime contempt for his remarks, no matter how serious.

And then he goes on.

People who make puns are like wanton boys that put coppers on the railroad tracks.

They amuse themselves and other children, but their little trick may upset a freight train of conversation for the sake of a battered witticism.

He’s touched upon a point here.

A pun is great if it’s not been overused, right?

Yes.

That’s the thing about puns.

When they are cycled and recycled and used and reused.

Yeah.

They grow tired and shabby.

Yeah, yeah.

And if you feel the buildup for them, you feel the person winding up.

Yeah, yeah.

That’s why I laughed at your headline, I think, earlier in the show.

It was unexpected, particularly in the New York Times, where nine-tenths of the headlines are pretty solid and serious.

Yeah.

And you get the style section or the commentary, and that’s when they start.

Or sports.

Sports is where they have the most fun with headlines, right?

And then you really start to see some magic happen.

Yeah.

And so when I groan at puns, part of it’s a shtick, right?

But part of it is just an acknowledgement that puns are mostly recycled and kind of tired,

Particularly if you don’t like repetition.

Well, it’s really interesting to think about what it is that’s going on in your mind when a pun happens.

I love that the way that—

Does he talk about this in the book?

Yes, yes.

Very good.

He, of course, in one of these noun books where you talk about everything under the sun involving puns.

So he did an MRI of somebody listening to puns.

Yes, yes.

Well, he didn’t, but he went through all this neurological.

Okay.

He did a Gladwellian compilation of all the research.

Thank you.

That’s exactly what he did.

And I like the way he describes this.

He says, for a split second, puns manage to hold open the elevator doors of language and meaning as the brain toggles furiously between competing semantic destinations before finally deciding which is the best answer or deciding to live with both.

And I love that.

I love that too.

But I usually put it this way.

I usually say, ha ha, words have two meanings.

I mean, that’s kind of what it boils down to.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Ha ha, you got me.

I was thinking of the other meaning.

We’d love to know what you think about puns.

You can call us, 877-929-9673, or send those emails to words@waywordradio.org.