those hideous transformations in a superhero movie. I walked into my room a normal person, was bitten on the ankle by a radioactive punster, and came staggering out a monster, spewing puns everywhere I turned.
With great power came great power to annoy.
And this state of things persisted.
• • •
When I got to college, everything changed. One of the first friends I made was someone who said, “Did you hear about the lady who shaved her legs and rectum?”
I nodded, feeling that sudden hot sensation that floods through your body when you experience true love or sit on something sharp.
“That’s my mom’s favorite pun,” she said.
And then I knew I was in the right place. We went on to be roommates and write several shows together, and after that she became a famous person whose Facebook updates I have to keep Liking. No, I’m kidding; we’re still friends. I think. (Call me?)
College was a parallel universe where punning was actually celebrated, in the form of the Hasty Pudding Theatricals, which I can best describe as a group for drinking, putting on an elaborate drag musical while drinking, and making puns while drinking. For a few halcyon years I breathed the rich, supersaturated air of people who could not see a word ending in “er” without tacking on “I hardly know ’er!” (To give you a sense of the level of wordplay involved, there was a show called “Acropolis Now” set in Ancient Greece, with a character named Hades Pantsaretight. I say “there was a show” like I didn’t cowrite it and take full responsibility for that pun.)
Then, gasping like a fish, I was decanted from college into the real world.
In real life there are few such safe spaces for puns. You cannot turn to someone during, say, an earthquake at your church and murmur, “Christ Church Parish? More like Christ Church Perish!” It just doesn’t get the reception you’d hope, like a disappointing wedding or [INSERT NAME OF YOUR CELL PROVIDER HERE!].
(You see what I’m talking about. It’s a disease.)
These days I work at a newspaper, where, in theory, there is plenty of room for puns. What are headlines, if not pun-Dumpsters? “WEINER HANGS OUT, EMBARRASSES CANDIDATE.”
But that was before the dark times. Before the Internet.
The Internet has given us punsters much—Twitter, for one—and I am grateful. But it has also paved over many of the pun’s time-honored stomping grounds. Newspaper headlines, which used to be safe spots where young puns could roam freely and graze at will, now have to be written to attract as much traffic as possible. A great headline pun, like “At Convention, Female Spiderman Spied Her Man” (okay, a passable pun) becomes “Six Unbelievable Tricks for Finding Love That Are Tangentially Related to Miley Cyrus in Some Way and Also Pornography! (Pornography)” or “This Article Made Me Cry for Six Reasons Beyoncé Beyoncé Beyoncé,” or no self-respecting search engine will ever point you toward it.
(For anyone reading this in the distant future, Miley Cyrus and Beyoncé were two basically amiable carbon-based life-forms who were very good at making mouth-sounds and for some reason everyone felt the need to talk about them ALL THE TIME. (Those Earthling meatsacks, am I right??) Also, hi, future reader! What’s an advanced life-form like you doing with a book like this? If you are near humans, please don’t hunt them and convert their parts into scrap!)
Without the headline as a pun dumping ground, I had to console myself by hunting down the pun in literature and history and spreading the Good News, with the kind of nervous tenacity generally reserved for people who want to give religion to you or get drugs from you.
“Jesus used to make lots of puns,” I told people on the bus. “That was how you could tell he had tremendous personal magnetism. Hewent up to Peter and said, ‘From now on, your name will be ‘Rock,’ because on this ‘Rock’ I build my
With great power came great power to annoy.
And this state of things persisted.
• • •
When I got to college, everything changed. One of the first friends I made was someone who said, “Did you hear about the lady who shaved her legs and rectum?”
I nodded, feeling that sudden hot sensation that floods through your body when you experience true love or sit on something sharp.
“That’s my mom’s favorite pun,” she said.
And then I knew I was in the right place. We went on to be roommates and write several shows together, and after that she became a famous person whose Facebook updates I have to keep Liking. No, I’m kidding; we’re still friends. I think. (Call me?)
College was a parallel universe where punning was actually celebrated, in the form of the Hasty Pudding Theatricals, which I can best describe as a group for drinking, putting on an elaborate drag musical while drinking, and making puns while drinking. For a few halcyon years I breathed the rich, supersaturated air of people who could not see a word ending in “er” without tacking on “I hardly know ’er!” (To give you a sense of the level of wordplay involved, there was a show called “Acropolis Now” set in Ancient Greece, with a character named Hades Pantsaretight. I say “there was a show” like I didn’t cowrite it and take full responsibility for that pun.)
Then, gasping like a fish, I was decanted from college into the real world.
In real life there are few such safe spaces for puns. You cannot turn to someone during, say, an earthquake at your church and murmur, “Christ Church Parish? More like Christ Church Perish!” It just doesn’t get the reception you’d hope, like a disappointing wedding or [INSERT NAME OF YOUR CELL PROVIDER HERE!].
(You see what I’m talking about. It’s a disease.)
These days I work at a newspaper, where, in theory, there is plenty of room for puns. What are headlines, if not pun-Dumpsters? “WEINER HANGS OUT, EMBARRASSES CANDIDATE.”
But that was before the dark times. Before the Internet.
The Internet has given us punsters much—Twitter, for one—and I am grateful. But it has also paved over many of the pun’s time-honored stomping grounds. Newspaper headlines, which used to be safe spots where young puns could roam freely and graze at will, now have to be written to attract as much traffic as possible. A great headline pun, like “At Convention, Female Spiderman Spied Her Man” (okay, a passable pun) becomes “Six Unbelievable Tricks for Finding Love That Are Tangentially Related to Miley Cyrus in Some Way and Also Pornography! (Pornography)” or “This Article Made Me Cry for Six Reasons Beyoncé Beyoncé Beyoncé,” or no self-respecting search engine will ever point you toward it.
(For anyone reading this in the distant future, Miley Cyrus and Beyoncé were two basically amiable carbon-based life-forms who were very good at making mouth-sounds and for some reason everyone felt the need to talk about them ALL THE TIME. (Those Earthling meatsacks, am I right??) Also, hi, future reader! What’s an advanced life-form like you doing with a book like this? If you are near humans, please don’t hunt them and convert their parts into scrap!)
Without the headline as a pun dumping ground, I had to console myself by hunting down the pun in literature and history and spreading the Good News, with the kind of nervous tenacity generally reserved for people who want to give religion to you or get drugs from you.
“Jesus used to make lots of puns,” I told people on the bus. “That was how you could tell he had tremendous personal magnetism. Hewent up to Peter and said, ‘From now on, your name will be ‘Rock,’ because on this ‘Rock’ I build my
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