THE PUN ALSO RISES

                                               by 

                                         Howard Richler

To pun or not to pun?

            It has been estimated that two-thirds of the jokes in a typical language collection rely on puns. But  puns have been much maligned by a host of commentators. Freud described puns as “cheap” and Oliver Wendell Holmes assailed them as “verbicide.” At times when I’ve used one on my daughter I get accused of telling a Dad joke. Puns, however, have had their defenders. Three hundred years ago Henry Erskine countered the statement that “a pun is the lowest form of wit” by adding that “it is therefore the foundation of all wit,” and Oscar Levant opined that it is the “lowest form of humor-when you didn't think of it first.”

Punning has been a language fixture through the ages.  In Homer's Odyssey, Odysseus introduces himself to the Cyclops, as Outis, which means “no man” in Greek.  He, then attacks the giant, who calls for reinforcement from his fellow monsters, with the plea “No man is killing me!”  Naturally, no one rushes to his aid, proving that the pun, is indeed, mightier than the sword.

In the Bible there are many puns on names. In Hebrew, adamah means ground and edom means red. The name Adam may derive from the red earth whence he came. The name Jacob is derived from the word for heel, because he held onto the heel of his older twin brother Esau at birth.  I award Jesus the prize for best Biblical pun. WE read in Matthew 16:18: “Thou art Peter (Greek Petros), and upon this rock (Greek petra) I will build my Church.” Pope Gregory, one-time guardian of the Rock, punned when he stated that English slaves were Non Angli, sed angeli,  that is, “not Angles, but angels.”

Shakespeare’s Puns

Tis said that in the art of punning, Shakespeare was great shakes and without peer

One study uncovered 3000 puns in the Bard's works, with an average of 78 puns per play. Many of these puns occur at climactic moments.  In Macbeth, after Macbeth has killed the King, Lady Macbeth displays a lucid dispassion when she avers, “I'll gild the faces of the grooms withal. For it must seem their guilt.”   At the beginning of Julius Caesar, the cobbler says he is a “saver of lost soles,” and if they are in danger, he re-covers them.” In Romeo and Juliet, the dying Mercutio exits stage left with this vaudevillian pun, “Ask for me tomorrow and you shall find me a grave man.”  This is but one of the estimated 175 puns in Romeo and Juliet.  Even the great Dane himself,  Hamlet, doggedly can not forgo expiring without  the pun “the rest is silence,”  proving the maxim that “Dying is easy, comedy is hard.”

Hamlet contains the most puns of all tragedies and there is a specific psychological reason for this. Prince Hamlet is forced to quibble and speak in ambiguous language lest he utter something overtly treasonous. The first encounter of Hamlet and Claudius highlights Hamlet’s clever use of words.  Claudius tries to placate Hamlet by addressing him as  “my Cosin Hamlet, and my sonne.” Hamlet then quips, “A

little more then kin, and lesse than kind.” Here, “kind”  possesses at least three meaning.   could be implying that Claudius is less than a direct blood relation or referring to his ancestral stock. “Kind” also means “natural” and Hamlet could be alluding to Claudius’s unnatural lust. And of course, “kind” in Shakespeare’s era also had the modern sense of “considerate.”

            Puns are one of the main weapons of political satire under dictatorships. They flourish during wars of religion, the Revolution, the Occupation and, nearer our time, in most police states.” A pun under Leonid Brezhnev`s Soviet regime declared that there was no news in Pravda (“truth”  in Russian) and no truth in Izvestia (“news” in Russian).

             

            What constitutes a great pun is largely subjective. Two of my favorites are the following:

A timid husband is unable to buy his wife's preferred anemones for her birthday and fearfully returns home bearing some greenery. To his surprise she gushes “With fronds like these who needs anemones? ” 

           

            A woman had twins, and gave them up for adoption. One of them went to an Egyptian family who named him Amal. The other was  adopted by a Spanish family who called him Juan. Years later, Juan sends a  picture of himself to his birth mother. She tells her husband that she would also like to have a photograph of Amal. Her husband responds, “But they’re twins! If you’ve seen Juan, you've seen Amal.”

 

            Here's a brief sampling of puns both sublime and ridiculous from some well-known pundits.

Groucho Marx –  Time wounds all heels.

When someone exclaimed “ Eureka.”  Chico Marx shot back – “You donna smella so good yourself. ” 

Edgar Bergen –  Show me where Stalin`s buried and I`ll show you a Communist plot.

Max Eastman – One of the advantages of nuclear war is that all men are cremated equal.

Dorothy Parker (asked to give a sentence with the word horticulture) –  You can lead a horticulture but you can`t make her think.

Oscar Wilde – Working is the curse of the drinking class.

H.L. Mencken –  Television is like a steak: a medium rarely well done.

Zsa Zsa Gabor – I am a very good housekeeper. Every time I get divorced, I keep the house.

Oscar Levant – (in an observation of Elizabeth Taylor) Always a bride, never a bridesmaid

 

VARIETY OF PUNS

French/English pun
          Did you hear about the French chef who committed suicide?  He lost the huile d'olive.

            Spelling & comprehension pun

            Little Johnny goes out on Halloween and rings the doorbell at Mrs Wilson’s. When she sees him she crows, “Johnny, what a lovely pirate suit but where are your buccaneers.”  Johnnny replies, “Where else? They’re under my buckin’ hat.”

Grammatical pun

            A woman picks up a cab at Boston Airport and asks “Can you tell me

where I can get scrod.” The cabby replies,  “Hey, I've never heard it expressed before in the pluperfect subjunctive.”

Animal Pun

            A vulture boards an airplane, carrying two dead raccoons. The flight attendant

looks at him and says, “I'm sorry, sir, only one carrion allowed per passenger. ”

Bar Pun

A three-legged dog walks into a saloon in the Old West. He sidles up to  the bar and announces: I'm looking for the man who shot my paw.

Crime Pun

            A thief breaks into the local police station and steals all the toilets and urinals, leaving no clues. A  CSI spokesperson was quoted as saying, “We have absolutely nothing to go on.”

            Ethnic & Geographical Pun

                         If you’re a Canadian when you’re outside the bathroom, what are you when

you’re in the bathroom? European.

             Health Care Puns

A man walks into a psychiatrist's office wearing only underwear made of

Saran Wrap. The psychiatrist says,  “Well, I can clearly see your nuts.”

   Quasi-Sexual Puns

An old man     takes a short-cut through an alley and is accosted by a busty wench  leaning on a lamppost clad in a rather short skirt. She asks him, “Hey buddy. Care for some super sex?”   He replies, “You know, I think I prefer the soup.”

Religious Pun

            Why is there an Old Testament and a New Testament?  Because even God keeps two sets of books.

Spoonerism Pun

First I’ll explain what a spoonerism is. It’s when you transpose phrases so an expression like Light rain becomes right lane. Oscar Wilde  quip that I mentioned earlier– Working is the curse of the drinking class is an example of a spoonerism.

With these examples in mind tell me if you get this spooneristic joke:

What`s the difference between a rooster and a lawyer?” Answer: “The rooster clucks defiance...”

We get the word  “spoonerism” from the Reverend William Archibald Spooner, Warden of New College in Oxford between 1903 and 1924. He was a highly respected administrator responsible for many reforms. History has been unkind to the dear Reverend. He is not remembered for his forward thinking but for his linguistic reversals, which have come to be called “spoonerisms.” An example of his mistakes, he once introduced Dr. Childe`s friend as “Dr. Friend`s child.” Oxonian students exaggerated his mistakes claiming  that during a wedding at which he officiated he supposedly blathered “if anyone present knows why this couple shouldn't be joyfully loined together Over time, the spoonerism has permeated popular culture in a myriad of ways and has become a popular comedic device. The Monty Python comedy troupe  made particular memorable use of spoonerisms. They had a skit in which a customer walks into a bookshop and asks the proprietor if he has a Sale of Two Titties by Darles Chickens?

Yiddish Cursing

I mentioned in my part on puns that political puns allow an outlet for oppressed groups or those who are afraid to directly make a criticism of a totalitarian government,

Verbal wit can serve as a safe outlet for repressed impulses. If your aggression is likely to elicit retaliation, it is prudent that your slings and arrows be linguistic rather than physical. Cursing has proved to be a cathartic tool for oppressed minorities. This is borne out by the colourful curses to be found among chronically subjugated groups such as gypsies, African-Americans and, of course,  Eastern European Jews.

 

The Jews who lived in Eastern Europe before WWII had no problems cursing creatively, as they enjoyed the advantage of speaking Yiddish, a tongue seemingly fashioned exclusively for the prickly barb. Leo Rosten described Yiddish as “a tongue that never takes its tongue out of its cheek” Yiddish curses should not be confused with the Hebraic curses of the Bible. Hebrew curses were deadly serious whereas there is a humorous thrust to almost all Yiddish curses. Although most people associate cursing with malevolence, Yiddish ones can be downright jocular. This is because the Yiddish curser usually does not believe in the power of her or his execrations. Yiddish cursing developed into a choreographed activity where satisfaction was gained by ejaculating an imaginative curse. Many of the curses were improvised and were designed to exhibit the verbal nimbleness of the execrator.  Yiddish curses lull you with their seeming innocence, then flatten you with

the punch line. An example of this verbal feinting is “May you lose all your teeth except one –so you can have a tooth ache.”

This is not to say that ill will was never directed towards others in Yiddish curses. Shtetl life in Eastern Europe was onerous and interactions did not take place in idyllically bucolic settings with fiddlers prancing on rooftops. In this environment, an acerbic wit and a good delivery could earn one much respect  A good example is, “May you fall into the outhouse just as a regiment of Cossacks finishes a prune stew and twelve barrels of beer!”  But in cursing your neighbour or your competitor at the market, you could pretend that the object of your scorn was the Czar or some other oppressor.

 

Yiddish cursing was, by and large, the domain of women. The men enjoyed sanctuary in holy studies but Jewish women could not indulge in this escape. Because men devoted most of their time to religious study, women became the family providers. The only profession open to her was work at the market and to release anxiety in this hectic workplace, it was necessary to learn to “curse like a market-woman.”

One would never merely say “Drop dead!” in Yiddish.  The simplest way of expressing this aspiration was “Into the earth with you! ” or “May he grow like an onion –  with his head in the ground. ” Since a child could only be named after a

deceased, you could kill with kindness by saying “May they name a baby after you!” 

One's death wish could be couched in blessings, as in  “May you have a sweet death and have a wagonload of sugar run over you”; “May God bless you with a son so smart he learns the mourner's prayer before his Bar Mitzvah speech!” and “May you be spared the indignities of old age!” Wishing disease or pain on someone was a popular theme, especially if the individual was wealthy. Benedictions took sudden u-turns and mutated into maledictions: “May he own ten shiploads of gold-and may all of it be spent on sickness.” Many of these disease ill wishes featured cholera, such as  “May the cholera seize him,” “A healthy cholera into your belly” and “A cholera in your bones!”  It must have been felt that bone cholera was more uncomfortable than the run-of-the-mill variety. Other ill wishes included, “May he be thrown into an ague,” “All problems I have in my heart should go to his head,”  “May you become famous – they should name a disease after you!” and “May your blood grow so healthy, your leeches' leeches need leeches!”  Anorexia nervosa was not a common ailment, and a zaftig figure was a sign of affluence and a selling point for the local matchmaker. “May you never develop stomach trouble from too rich a diet” was definitely not a blessing but it sounds desirable next to  “May you grow four stomachs like a cow, so that you get four times the bellyache and four times the heartburn.”

 

Henny Youngman’s mother-in-law jokes notwithstanding, in Yiddish culture, a mother-in-law was not the bane of a man, but of a woman who could be constantly besieged by her mother-in-law in the home or the market. Two examples of women’s disdain for mothers- in-law are, “May your mother-in-law treat you like her own daughter and move in with you!” and “May your husband`s father marry three times so that you have not one but three mothers-in-law!”