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http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/05/20/without-compunction/]
The Paris Review
Without Compunction
by Ted Trautman
Doing verbal battle at the O. Henry Pun-Off World Championships.
May 20, 2014
The only thing harder than crafting a good pun is finding someone to
appreciate it. It's not that puns are universally reviled--though their
critics make it seem that way. It's just that for every person who loves a
clever play on words, there exists another who absolutely despises them;
in mixed company, puns are, along with politics and religion, best left
alone. If only there were an app that could match people by their senses
of humor. Tinder? I barely know 'er!
If it's difficult to pun profitably in the United States, it's all but
impossible in Mexico, where I've been living for the past year. Here I'm
limited somewhat by my imperfect Spanish, but also by a lack of fellow
punning linguists. There's not even a word for pun in Spanish, which made
it difficult to explain to friends here that after ten months of wasting
my presumably hilarious wordplay on their apparently deaf ears, I'd bought
myself a ticket to Austin, Texas, to compete in the O. Henry Pun-Off World
Championships. Despite its grandiose name, there is no qualifying round
ahead of this "championship," and, with the exception of a lanky
Englishman in a chicken suit, all the participants were American.
"So a pun is like a play on words?" a Mexican friend asked before I set
out, using the Spanish phrase juego de palabras, that most dictionaries
list as the translation for "pun."
Well, yes, I said, but it's a specific kind of play on words. I tried to
find an example, but I hadn't realized until that moment just how
difficult it is to come up with puns on the spot. The example I offered,
which defined the exchange of sex for spaghetti as pasta-tution, didn't
translate as well as I'd hoped.
But punning off the cuff is exactly what's required to succeed in the
Pun-Off's marquee event. Contestants in the "Punslingers" bracket, facing
off in pairs onstage, are given a theme--Disney, weather, et cetera--and
forced to make thematically relevant puns every ten seconds or so until
one contestant runs out of ideas.
The result, of course, is a series of mostly terrible puns, the sort that
elicit the classic weary groan with which puns are so unfortunately
associated. "There's a hook made specially for grabbing people named
Ling," to name one of countless examples. "The GrappLing hook!"
Just as a slam dunk in basketball earns the same number of points as a
layup, this portion of the Pun-Off rewards a contestant for the quantity
of her puns rather than their quality. As the moderators explained several
times, in a refrain later echoed by desperate contestants defending their
ripostes, "It doesn't have to be good. It just has to be a pun." The
Punslingers event may be the only sport on Earth in which the highest
level of play is the most painful to watch.
Herein lies the Pun-Off's ontological dilemma. In real life, the best puns
tend to be spontaneous: many are funny in the moment but fail to rise to
the higher standard to which we hold jokes that are given time to grow and
improve in the course of being committed to paper. And yet the sustained,
absolute spontaneity that comes of scraping out pun after pun onstage
quickly pulls every contestant down to the bottom of the barrel--a low
stratum I think of as "[blank]er, I barely know her" territory.
The closest I've come to finding a resolution to this dilemma is in the
work of the early twentieth-century humorist Stephen Leacock, to which I
was introduced by this year's Punniest of Show winner Alexandra Petri, who
also happens to write a pun-heavy column for the Washington Post. "The
inveterate punster," Leacock wrote, "follows conversation as a shark
follows a ship." What is missing from the Pun-Off, then, is this
conversation; onstage, we inveterate punsters are forced to play only with
the words we can find inside ourselves, rather than lying in wait for a
punworthy moment in the course of normal dialogue. Hence the excess of
gimmes like "philosophers Kant hold their liquor," as opposed to a more
organic, transcendent play on words, as when I misremembered the color of
a friend's car years ago and he told me that "it must have been a pigment
of my imagination." Or when a friend interning for a congressman confessed
that he snuck a glance at John Boehner's crotch in a Capitol restroom and
I declared him the Peeker of the House. Such turns of phrase are unlikely
to appear in any serious writing I attempt down the road, and yet the
elation they produce is among my favorite feelings: a credit to their
author and a gift to anyone with the wit and good sense to enjoy them.
When it was my turn to take the stage in Austin, however, all that wit and
good sense promptly left me--boiled away, perhaps, as the scant shade
migrated from my picnic blanket to the lawn chairs and their foresighted
occupants behind me. A good two hundred people came to watch us sculpt and
mangle the English language in the yard behind the O. Henry Museum, a
modest old house wedged between towering hotels in downtown Austin. From
under a tent just left of the small stage, a panel of judges doled out
their points, but the real power lay with the moderators onstage, whose
task it was to confirm that each new volley was indeed a pun, and not a
mere cliché or, worse still, the kind of double entendre whose second
meaning is derived from suggestive inflection rather than a legitimate
play on words. And while, between rounds, the moderators showed themselves
to be talented punsters in their own right, the stronger competitors' deep
vocabularies occasionally extended beyond those of anyone else on stage.
Playing on the theme of art, for example, one contestant said he'd come up
with a better pun if he weren't so groggy--which, besides describing a
state of exhaustion, apparently also names a kind of crushed clay used in
pottery. Dictionaries being too unwieldy for a fast-paced live
competition, in such moments the moderators have little choice but to take
a contestant at her wordplay.
My time on stage challenged no one's vocabulary, unless someone simply
couldn't find the words to express how quickly I was knocked out of
contention. My opponent and I were given the theme of horses, a subject
about which I know almost nothing; I opened with a weak joke about
"stallion" for time, and before I caught my breath it was my turn again. I
mumbled something about a quarter horse that was not quite a pun; the
moderators gave me a chance to come up with something better, and after
emitting the same faux-contemplative ums and ahs that used to escape me
when caught off-guard in a job interview, I threw up my hands and admitted
defeat. Despite a lifetime of making and loving puns, not to mention
crossing an international border to demonstrate what until recently I
called my skills, I'm almost certain I gave the weakest performance of the
day.
My poor performance was a predictable result of my inexperience with the
relevant kind of pun. Like Leacock's shark, I follow conversations waiting
for a good moment to strike. The constraints of the Punslingers tournament
make for something more like a SeaWorld show: a performer can do great
things if he's comfortable with the walls placed around him.
Indeed, my favorite moment of the day occurred during a round in which
players had to pun on the theme of "Groups (human and animal)"--e.g.,
flock, herd, choir, and the like. The two men on stage had exhausted most
of the obvious words in the category, and were beginning to butt heads
with the moderators as they strayed from proper groups into things like
the spaces that hold groups (a stadium, a toolbox) and the plural form of
any noun that came to mind (fans, otters), which would have allowed the
round to run on indefinitely. After a healthy volley one of the
contestants offered an invalid answer, and then another, courting
disqualification. And then he rebounded with the perfect pun--not the most
clever, not the most original, but one that managed to both keep the round
going and poke fun at the increasingly strict moderators: "Next year," he
said, "this topic ought to be band." Despite the limits on both time and
topic, this contestant delivered a pun in the heat of the moment that,
against all odds, actually made sense. The crowd went wild, perhaps
forgetting for a moment that on Monday they would have to return to a
world where words mean just one thing at a time.
Ted Trautman has written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Slate, Wired,
and others. He lives in Puebla, Mexico.
