John Pollack is an admitted compulsive pun maker. He claims that his first complete sentence was “Bears go barefoot.” He won the 1995 O. Henry Pun-Off World Championship. The stipulated subject was “external body parts.” The double meaning that gained him his victory was “I’m going to chinnel my energy into coming up with a new pun.”
Mercifully, once Pollack has finished describing this contest in excruciating detail, he has a number of things to say that are intelligent instead of clever.
He rightly gives the pun the broadest definition, encompassing all the linguistic, symbolic and even gestural ambiguities of communication. One of the “world’s experts on the science of laughter” tells him that “the first joke in human history was most likely a feigned tickle.” He describes the neurological backtracking and cross-referencing required to process ambiguity. His explanations of the anatomical regions and electrochemical activities in the brain are scientific, but not so scientific as to make the brain ache. He tells us, with a clarity unusual for the subject, how the mind works when presented with the multiple meanings of a pun “to make its best educated guess about the speaker’s intent, including the possibility that this intent is to convey multiple meanings.”
Most of the book, however, is devoted to the history and significance of punning. The recorded history of the pun goes back further than the recorded history of almost anything else. In the caves of our Paleolithic ancestors, 35,000-year-old figurines have been found, each appearing to be a naked woman when viewed from one angle and an erect penis when viewed from another. The human tendency to pun is carved in stone.
Pollack, who has worked as a journalist and was a presidential speechwriter for Bill Clinton, collects a variety of research, anecdotes and observations. Punning is the source of the phonetic alphabet. Sumerian scribes began using pictographs to represent not just what was pictured but the sound of the name of what was pictured. The result, Pollack says, was comparable to a modern text message — “cu 2morrow @5.”
King Charles I’s court jester, Archy Armstrong, lost his job by saying grace — “Great praise be given to God and little laud to the Devil” — at dinner with the archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud. The Newspeak of “1984” was meant to preclude, among other things, puns. “Its vocabulary was so constructed,” George Orwell wrote, “as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings.” And although the pun seems always to have had its comic uses, it is also a formal rhetorical device. The pun can be employed seriously, as when Lady Macbeth goes to smear the blood of murdered Duncan on some innocent servants: “I’ll gild the faces of the grooms withal, / For it must seem their guilt.”
The problem with Pollack’s historical survey of puns is that it misses the greatest puns in history. He ignores many of the best practitioners of the idiom — Jesus and Sir Charles Napier, to name two. Jesus said to his disciple Peter, “Upon this rock I will build my church.” That was not only a pun on Peter’s name, which means rock, but also a pun on the character of Peter, who, in the garden of Gethsemane, would deny Jesus thrice before cockcrow. Napier led an unauthorized conquest of the Indian emirate of Sind and is supposed to have sent Queen Victoria a one-word dispatch: “Peccavi.” (Latin for “I have sinned.”)
Pollack mentions Abbott and Costello only in passing, without description or transcription of their “Who’s on first?” exchange. He also gives short shrift to the Marx Brothers, even though the “contract scene” in “A Night at the Opera” contains perhaps the 20th century’s most famous pun.
Groucho: “That’s in every contract. That’s, that’s what they call a ‘sanity clause.’ ”
Chico: “You can’t fool me. There ain’t no Sanity Claus.”
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P. J. O’Rourke’s latest book is “Don’t Vote: It Just Encourages the Bastards.”
via nytimes.com