Why English is such a great language for puns

The quip and the dreadWhy English is such a great language for puns

Gamers now even take part in world champunships

Away With Words: An Irreverent Tour Through the World of Pun Competitions. By Joe Berkowitz. Harper Perennial; 273 pages; $15.99 and £8.99.

LAST week's issue of this paper contained the following headlines: "Rooms for improvement" (in a story about British housing); "Though Mooch is taken, Mooch abides" (on the firing of Anthony Scaramucci); and "LIBOR pains" (on interbank loan rates). The Economist is not alone in its taste for wordplay. Our colleagues at the Financial Times routinely sneak subtle jokes into their headlines (July 17th: "Why China's global shipping ambitions will not easily be contained") while those at the tabloids indulge themselves more obviously. On the arrest of a famous golfer for drink-driving: "DUI of the Tiger".

These authors are fortunate to work at English-language publications. For English is unusually good for puns. It has a large vocabulary and a rich stock of homophones from which puns can be made. It is constantly evolving, with new words being invented and old ones given fresh meanings. And it is mostly uninflected, allowing for verbs and nouns to switch places. Moreover, other than the occasional customary feminine pronoun, for ships, say, or nation-states, it has no gendered nouns, which makes it easier to play with innuendo and double entendres. (Chinese is another good language for punsters, which is a boon for those keen to avoid the country's censors. Puns are especially popular around Chinese new year.)

Newspaper editors get paid to write silly jokes for an audience. But over the past few years a growing band of amateurs has taken up the sport. In New York a monthly event called Punderdome features jokesters with pseudonyms such as "Punder Enlightening", "Jargon Slayer" and "Words Nightmare" who compete over the course of four increasingly absurd rounds. Similar competitions exist in Washington, DC, (Beltway Pundits), Milwaukee (Pundamonium), San Francisco (Bay Area Pun-Off) and elsewhere. The annual O. Henry Pun-Off in Austin, Texas, which started in 1978, bills itself as the genre's World Championship. (Word Champunship, surely?)

But who would pay to watch people make puns? That was how Joe Berkowitz, an editor at Fast Company, an American business magazine, reacted when he first discovered Punderdome. He went on to spend a year travelling round America, attending pun-parties and interviewing humour experts and comedy writers. The outcome? "Away With Words", a faintly anthropological examination of puns and the people who make them. The chief attraction of these competitions, he reports, is that they create a space for something "people feel like they're not supposed to like and ought not to do".

Puns are widely held in low esteem, a justifiable consideration. They are one of the first forms of humour that children understand and deploy, before they move on to more sophisticated jokes that use language semantically, Vinod Goel, a neuroscientist, tells Mr Berkowitz. That may account both for the reaction that puns get from listeners—the groan suggesting that the punster ought to know better—but also for their popularity. Many puns are indeed juvenile. They are also easy to understand.

Yet puns demand intelligence, creativity and general knowledge: the best draw on cultural references, allude to several things at the same time and are intricately constructed (such as the one about Mahatma Gandhi, who walked barefoot a lot and often fasted, leading to bad breath, thus making him a "super calloused fragile mystic hexed by halitosis"). The Harry Potter series would be less magical without Knockturn Alley and Diagon Alley. Salman Rushdie uses puns without shame.

It is not just the quality of puns that is divisive but also the definition. At Punderdome a pun is simply "a play on words". The winners are picked by volume of applause. At the O. Henry Pun-Off onstage referees disqualify what they consider subpar wordplay, and a panel of judges hold up scores at the end of each round. Every potential topic is heavily pun-tested by organisers before being deemed fit for play. "I sometimes get embarrassed by how seriously I take this," says one veteran contestant of both competitions.

He is not alone. This reviewer disregards any pun that requires a hyphen (ovicular puns are egg-specially eggs-cruciating) and believes that puns must have a set-up (the more elaborate the better). Throughout "Away With Words" punsters, comedy writers and academics offer their own standards for how to tell a good pun from a bad one. Mr Berkowitz himself cannot resist the temptation to set a few rules. The four types of bad pun, according to him, are those that suffer from bad timing, are too obvious, have no second meaning or are too earnest.

A pun, like porn, is defined less by intention than by reception. One contestant at the O. Henry, on the topic of birds, told the audience, "Beak kind to me, don't thrush to judgment, I'm not robin anyone, hawking anything, talon tails out of school, ducking responsibilities or emulating anyone." Only the reader should decide whether that deserves a prize or social ostrichism.

Correction (August 15th, 2017): As many commenters and letter-writers have pointed out, "ovine" means relating to sheep, not eggs. The correct word is ovicular. This has been amended. Apologies for the woolly thinking. 

This article appeared in the Books and arts section of the print edition under the headline "The quip and the dread"

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