From Tim Vine to Shakespeare, why all the best comedy groans with puns
‘What’s brown and sticky?” Ask my five-year-old. He’ll say: “A stick.” The first verbal jokes most of us ever found funny were likely to have been puns. And the sophistication of the puns we enjoy grows with the sophistication of our language. Which of us doesn’t remember with fondness the bad-mannered panda that gave Lynne Truss her book title ( Eats, Shoots and Leaves)? Or the unfortunate hedgehog robbed of his unusually shaped private parts by a “four-point-tool-eater jaguar”?
We may claim not to think much of them, then – but puns are right down there, the mirepoix in the primal soup of our collective sense of humour. And those of us who still defiantly enjoy them will mourn a little at news that one of their most determined exponents is hanging up his punning shoes.
Stewart Francis is giving his last-ever shows this weekend. That’s a blow to the pun-osphere
– or so the pundits will be saying. The
Canadian is the man responsible for such gems as:
“Today, a courier dropped off only part of my grizzly costume. I was so angry I choked him with my bear hands.” And: “My trial for butchering a live chicken resumes Monday. I’ll try to keep you a breast.”
Tim Vine and Jimmy Carr will keep on, surely. And there’ll always be, I hope,
I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue (“Mishmash”: what Sean Connery does if he can’t make it to church; “Module”: Christmas with
The Who).
Puns animate the high and low alike.
Perhaps the most famous historical pun is the report dispatched to his superiors by General Napier on the capture of Sindh: “Peccavi.” That’s Latin for “I have sinned.” Positively straightforward next to what the Europeans were capable of. It’s said that when Frederick the Great invited Voltaire to supper, he wrote:
_p__ à _ci__ venez sans.
Venez sous (“under”) p à sans sous (“under”) ci: “Venez souper à Sanssouci.” Come to dinner at Sanssouci (Frederick’s summer palace). The reply came simply: “G a.” G grand A petit: “J’ai grand appetit.” And for something widely and ignorantly derided as “the lowest form of wit” they sure do have a literary pedigree. Shakespeare and Chaucer loved a pun. John Donne (“When thou hast done, thou hast not done, for I have more”) wouldn’t have been the poet he was without them. Puns are one of the structuring principles princ of Eliot’s Four Quartets. A play on words gives us the turning point of Richardson’s great novel Clarissa (“I am setting out with all diligence for my father’s house” – she means heaven). Part of Homer’s Odyssey turns on a pun (“Nobody is hurting me!” exclaims the Cyclops as he is blinded by Odysseus who had introduced himself as “Nobody”). And as for Anthony Burgess, not content with The End of the World News, based the entire
novel Abba Abba on a pun between the Aramaic word for father and the rhyme scheme for the octave of a Petrarchan sonnet. Crossword clues, of course, are almost all based on puns. Pretty girl in crimson rose (8), anyone? Why, “rebelled”, obviously. HIJKLMNO (5)? “Water”. Gegs (9,4)? “Scrambled eggs.” We could go on. And let’s not forget headlines. The football match, for instance, where “Super Caley Go
Ballistic, Celtic Are Atrocious”; or the review of The Name of the Rose titled “Felonious Monks”. And respect, of course, to the Prime Minister – a great loss to subediting – who once unimprovably titled an article about Philip Larkin “Onan The Librarian”.
Part of the pleasure of the pun is in its very contrivance. And the more elaborate pun offers a sort of double pleasure – in which the laughter comes not only with the surprise of the laugh-line, but in an aftershock of recognition of the wit of the punster and the elasticity of a language that will permit it. The more groanworthy, sometimes, the better.
With which thought, we should perhaps end by mentioning Viz
The definition of ‘Mishmash’? What Sean Connery does if he can’t get to church
comic’s surreal series of punchlines to Gilbert Ratchet strips. In one, he’s promised afternoon tea with the Prince of Wales.
“There you go,” says his benefactor, in the next panel. “You can use that golf tee subsequent to Herman’s Hermits frontman Peter Noone in a room festooned with reproduction pictures of large aquatic mammals.” There’s Peter Noone, with a golf club, burbling: “No milk today, my love has gone away.” “Bah!” says Gilbert. “It’s THIS kind of ‘after Noone tee’ with the ‘prints of whales’!”