Punning House (Steve) has kindly asked me to scribble a few words on Punning, at which I am honoured. It’s not for me to say that I have been universally recognised as among the titans of competitive punning. I will leave it to others to discuss whether I am deserving of my reputation for being quick of wit and deep of knowledge, verbose and charming, able to link disparate categories in a single bound and gently caress and coax that hearty mistress the English language to new heights she never dreamed possible, like a thoughtful lover of boundless linguistic virility. Although it is discussed. And the answer is always ‘Yes. Of course that reputation is wholly deserved. Are you mental?’ Let’s be clear about that.
I pun for the pure and wholesome joy of word play itself; of sculpting beautiful new works of art from the featureless rock of language. I care not for plaudits such as “performing at the highest level,” (Pun-Off Results 16.12.11) or “fast becoming one of the greats,” (Pun-Off Results 9.12.11). I really take little note and certainly don’t keep a scrap book.
What I am proud to call myself though, without question, is a student of the glorious art and science of punning. I hope to make my own small contribution to the Punning Community by bringing you some diverting notes on punning history, tactics, philosophy and a good measure of feckless meandering. I’d like to start this series of essays with a tirade against those wrongheaded, ignorant and witless enough to deride the pun; the pinnacle of all human achievement. These poor creatures must be pitied. Struck repeatedly in the face, yes. But also pitied. For what joyless lives they must lead if they greet a fine pun with a groan, believing this makes them seem discerning, arrogantly thinking themselves above those of us intrepid enough to explore words, to discover their cadence and rhythm and finally, wondrously, find each word its unlikely but perfect mate and bring forth a glorious new creation. Let’s meet some of these knob cheeses.
Sigmund Freud, in his 1917 work Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious, writes "[Puns] are generally counted as the lowest form of wit, perhaps because they are ‘cheapest' and can be formed with the least effort." This, clearly, is a man who never witnessed a Friday Pun-Off and the endeavour that goes into creating a clear, flowing, technically sound and yet mirth raising treble or quarto pun. Instead, Freud built a career on having the mind-set of a 12 year old boy, running around academic conferences with a snotty nose shouting “Hur! That looks like a willy!” and “See your Mum? You fancy her you do!” Clearly an intellectual lightweight who couldn’t come up with a half decent pun if it rose up from his unconscious mind in the dream state. He also said “Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock.” True words, but surely civilisation reached maturity when someone carved the rock into a work of art and, equally, carved the word into a pun (before going on to make a laboured extended metaphor). Punners 1, Freud 0.
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| Freud: Smoking a phallus |
His fellow knob cheese Noah Webster is regarded as the father of the American English Dictionary. Versions of his books on grammar, spelling and usage are still most often considered the ultimate authority by our cousins form the U.S of States. And yet how can any thinking person rely at all on rules of language laid down by a man who said (and you’d better sit down) “Punning is a low species of wit.”
It won’t surprise you to learn, then, that the fine American writer Bill Bryson has it in his book Mother Tongue that Webster was “by all accounts a severe, correct, humorless, religious, temperate man who was not easy to like, even by other severe, religious, temperate, humorless people. A provincial schoolteacher and not-very-successful lawyer from Hartford, he was short, pale, smug, and boastful... Where Samuel Johnson spent his free hours drinking and discoursing in the company of other great men, Webster was a charmless loner who critized almost everyone but was himself not above stealing material from others... He credited himself with coining many words... which in fact had been in the language for centuries.”
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Webster: Seperated at birth from Les Dawson |
It is joyless, pedantic prigs like Webster that would deride the pun and shackle us to a world of dry, dour paucity of expression. Just as an abstract painter must first learn to draw perfectly from life, so a punner must be fully cogent on a huge range of words; intimately familiar with their various meanings, their spelling, their phonetics, quirks of regional pronunciation and every facet of language. Once the confines of everyday language have been understood and mastered the punner, as an artist, owes it to the world to break them, to create new joys and wonders, to have a good old roll around in the marvellous haphazard vagaries of words.
I’m sure in weeks to come we will meet some of the countless notable punners who fight the good fight on our side, but for now I will sign off with the words of a man with the imagination and balls to be a creator as well as a critic; Edgar Allan Poe:
"Of puns it has been said that those who most dislike them are those who are least able to utter them."
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| Poe: Raven' about Puns |
