it was close.)
Fran Lebowitz said that the opposite of talking isn’t listening—the opposite of talking is waiting. For punsters, the opposite of talking is waiting to make a pun.
Just recently, I was having a perfectly nice brunch when someone said, “I love lychee,” and with horror I heard myself saying, “I Love Lychee was my favorite 1950s sitcom.”
“Whyyyy?” everyone groaned, and I shrugged and shrank down in the chair and tried to explain that it wasn’t me; it was the condition.
It is the condition. It’s a sickness. It’s a disease.
My favorite quote about punning is from Stephen Leacock, who noted, “The inveterate punster follows conversation as a shark follows a ship.”
If so, this explains why sharks have so few chums.
(You see?)
Hearing nothing, understanding nothing, waiting only to make a meal of a carelessly dropped word, the punster follows, dogged and ineluctable in his pursuit, like Captain Ahab but leggier.
And now I’ve got the badge to prove it. Well, the trophy. Well, three trophies, if we’re staring at my rack.
I wasn’t born with it. It isn’t a thing you’re born with, like a silver spoon or a caul or synesthesia (I
wish
I had synesthesia! Right now, if I want to taste the rainbow, I have to buy a bag of Skittles) or a cool mutation that allows you to light things on fire with your thoughts. It’s learned.
I know when I learned it, too. My parents, worried that I might become popular at school, got me a book of puns at an impressionable age.
It worked like a charm. Puns were my anti-drug. They were my anti-social life. My social circle shrank to those who could tolerate long, rambling jokes that concluded with a triumphant “AND THAT’S WHY PEOPLE WHO LIVE IN GRASS HOUSES SHOULDN’T STOW THRONES.” No chance of falling in with a bad crowd who would introduce me to Boys and Liquor and Jazz—but, hey, as the fern liked to say, with fronds like these, who needs anemones?
The book my parents gave me,
Pun and Games
by the eminent punster Richard Lederer, taught you how to take any conversation you were faced with and turn it into a pun. It was the wordplay equivalent of a manual on how to build bombs from common household materials. It came complete with sets of pun-problems for you to fill out with a pencil or pen.
There were lots of other wordplay games, too, like decoding vanity plates for various professions. NML 10DR was a zookeeper. 10SNE1 was a tennis pro. And those are just the ones I remember off the top of my head.
I learned about inflationary language, whereby “wonderful” became “twoderful” and “I don’t know what you ate that for” becomes “I don’t know what you nine that five.” It didn’t make sense to anyone who wasn’t me, but so what? That was the story of my life.
I learned about Spoonerisms. William Archibald Spooner was an Oxford don who gained fame by inadvertently swapping around the beginnings of his words. “Three cheers for our queer old dean!” he once toasted, raising a glass to Queen Victoria. “Mardon me, Padam, you are occupewing my pie,” he told a lady at church. “May I sew you to another sheet?” During World War I he commented, “When the boys come back from France, we’ll have the hags flung out.”
He wasn’t useful in average conversation, but he was great if I ever got into a situation where a cutting retort was called for. “You,” I would sneer, “are what William Archibald Spooner would have called a shining wit.”
No one ever seemed to notice how biting this was. Again, this was the story of my life.
By the time I had worked my way through all the exercises, learning along the way that “the man who hated seabirds left no tern unstoned, while the talented masseuse left no stern untoned,” I was unstoppable.
I hadn’t been a shark before, but now my eyes were opened. I saw pun potential everywhere. I began to follow conversations, sniffing for blood in the water. It was like one of
Fran Lebowitz said that the opposite of talking isn’t listening—the opposite of talking is waiting. For punsters, the opposite of talking is waiting to make a pun.
Just recently, I was having a perfectly nice brunch when someone said, “I love lychee,” and with horror I heard myself saying, “I Love Lychee was my favorite 1950s sitcom.”
“Whyyyy?” everyone groaned, and I shrugged and shrank down in the chair and tried to explain that it wasn’t me; it was the condition.
It is the condition. It’s a sickness. It’s a disease.
My favorite quote about punning is from Stephen Leacock, who noted, “The inveterate punster follows conversation as a shark follows a ship.”
If so, this explains why sharks have so few chums.
(You see?)
Hearing nothing, understanding nothing, waiting only to make a meal of a carelessly dropped word, the punster follows, dogged and ineluctable in his pursuit, like Captain Ahab but leggier.
And now I’ve got the badge to prove it. Well, the trophy. Well, three trophies, if we’re staring at my rack.
I wasn’t born with it. It isn’t a thing you’re born with, like a silver spoon or a caul or synesthesia (I
wish
I had synesthesia! Right now, if I want to taste the rainbow, I have to buy a bag of Skittles) or a cool mutation that allows you to light things on fire with your thoughts. It’s learned.
I know when I learned it, too. My parents, worried that I might become popular at school, got me a book of puns at an impressionable age.
It worked like a charm. Puns were my anti-drug. They were my anti-social life. My social circle shrank to those who could tolerate long, rambling jokes that concluded with a triumphant “AND THAT’S WHY PEOPLE WHO LIVE IN GRASS HOUSES SHOULDN’T STOW THRONES.” No chance of falling in with a bad crowd who would introduce me to Boys and Liquor and Jazz—but, hey, as the fern liked to say, with fronds like these, who needs anemones?
The book my parents gave me,
Pun and Games
by the eminent punster Richard Lederer, taught you how to take any conversation you were faced with and turn it into a pun. It was the wordplay equivalent of a manual on how to build bombs from common household materials. It came complete with sets of pun-problems for you to fill out with a pencil or pen.
There were lots of other wordplay games, too, like decoding vanity plates for various professions. NML 10DR was a zookeeper. 10SNE1 was a tennis pro. And those are just the ones I remember off the top of my head.
I learned about inflationary language, whereby “wonderful” became “twoderful” and “I don’t know what you ate that for” becomes “I don’t know what you nine that five.” It didn’t make sense to anyone who wasn’t me, but so what? That was the story of my life.
I learned about Spoonerisms. William Archibald Spooner was an Oxford don who gained fame by inadvertently swapping around the beginnings of his words. “Three cheers for our queer old dean!” he once toasted, raising a glass to Queen Victoria. “Mardon me, Padam, you are occupewing my pie,” he told a lady at church. “May I sew you to another sheet?” During World War I he commented, “When the boys come back from France, we’ll have the hags flung out.”
He wasn’t useful in average conversation, but he was great if I ever got into a situation where a cutting retort was called for. “You,” I would sneer, “are what William Archibald Spooner would have called a shining wit.”
No one ever seemed to notice how biting this was. Again, this was the story of my life.
By the time I had worked my way through all the exercises, learning along the way that “the man who hated seabirds left no tern unstoned, while the talented masseuse left no stern untoned,” I was unstoppable.
I hadn’t been a shark before, but now my eyes were opened. I saw pun potential everywhere. I began to follow conversations, sniffing for blood in the water. It was like one of
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