Due Punishment
Posted by Rebecca Teti in Reviews on Tuesday, March 31, 2009 3:00 PM
In “Pun For The Ages,” Joseph Tartovsky reflects on the nature and history of the pun.
(The essay also contains some terrible examples.)
I confess I love puns, though they are supposed to be the world’s lowest form of humor.
I also think word play is a great device for expanding vocabulary without kids knowing what you’re up to. At our family dinner table growing up, if anyone punned, the rest of us would try to keep going with additional groaners on the same topic. (Chicken for dinner could lead to fowl language, cheep remarks, stories with a wing of truth to them… it was enough to make anyone peckish.)
Any time we ate any sort of melon, my mom was compelled by some malignant force within her to announce in stentorian tones, “She can’t elope lest her honey do.” Then she’d burst out laughing as her adolescent offspring rolled their eyes. I’m certain she did it just to torture us.
Once such a joke got me into trouble. I was living abroad in a Spanish-speaking community and had been told our chaplain loved word play. But when I remarked to him on October 9 that it was the day of “las san denistas” (female devotees of St. Denis), I got back a homily about the marxism of the Sandinistas. Due punishment, I suppose; I’ve confined my punning to English ever since.
I won’t insult your taste by suggesting you might like puns too, but if you’d like to share a remark you particularly didn’t enjoy, do.
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