Posted on 03/29/2009 10:22:41 AM PDT by billorites
THE inglorious pun! Dryden called it the “lowest and most groveling kind of wit.” To Ambrose Bierce it was a “form of wit to which wise men stoop and fools aspire.” Universal experience confirms the adage that puns don’t make us laugh, but groan. It is said that Caligula ordered an actor to be roasted alive for a bad pun. (Some believe he was inclined to extremes.)
Addison defined the pun as a “conceit arising from the use of two words that agree in the sound, but differ in the sense.” “Energizer Bunny Arrested! Charged with Battery.” No laugh? Q.E.D.
Puns are the feeblest species of humor because they are ephemeral: whatever comic force they possess never outlasts the split second it takes to resolve the semantic confusion. Most resemble mathematical formulas: clever, perhaps, but hardly occasion for knee-slapping. The worst smack of tawdriness, even indecency, which is why puns, like off-color jokes, are often followed by apologies. Odds are that a restaurant with a punning name — Snacks Fifth Avenue, General Custard’s Last Stand — hasn’t acquired its first Michelin star.
How have the great comic writers regarded puns? Jane Austen puns once, in “Mansfield Park,” and it serves to impeach the moral character of the offender. Mark Twain’s first book, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” enamored reviewers with its punlessness. There are “no contortions of words,” said a London paper. “His fun is entirely dependent upon the inherent humor in his writings.” The 20th century’s finest humorist, P. G. Wodehouse, doesn’t use them.
Shakespeare, however, does. Many are bawdy: puns operate, after all, on double entendre. Yet the poet is guilty less of punning than wordplay, which Elizabethan taste considered more a sign of literary refinement than humor; hence “puns” in seemingly inappropriate places,
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Thanks wildbill!
When speaking of puns on FR, I’m not even en the top tendre.
CH roooools!
...and of course, to another of FR’s punster hall of fame members, this is naturally worthy of ping consideration...
I used to take my wife to the jousting tournaments but quit. She could never keep the combatants straight.
If I told her once, I told her a hundred times... The Chec’s in the mail
Pinging my pun-pals
Arrrrrggghhh. Actual pain experienced....
HAL: I threw my back out about 15 years ago. Ever since I have been very careful. I only buy furniture in the ergonomics store.
ELAINE: Oh those places have the stupidest names. Like, uh, “Back in Business”, or “Good Vertibrations”.
HAL: Not this one. It’s called the “Lumbar Yard”.
Lol
LOL
Did you explain to her that once a King always a King but once a Knight is enough?
But then I seem to have a vague memory that long ago thrice a Knight was not enough for me.
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