"Pun,
an expression that achieves emphasis or humor by contriving an
ambiguity, two distinct meanings being either suggested by the same
word or by two similar-sounding words." -- The Concise Oxford
Dictionary of Literary Terms.
While
Shakespeare is said to have used some 3,000 puns in his plays, Oliver
Wendel Holmes thinks puns are the ill conceived bastards of language,
or words to that effect: "People who make puns are like wanton boys
who put coppers on the
railroad tracks. They amuse themselves and other children, but their
little trick may upset a freight train of conversation for the sake of
a battered witticism."
Poe suggests that "The goodness of the true pun is in the direct ratio of its intolerability" and Fred Allen vows that "Hanging is too good for a man who makes puns; he should be drawn and quoted."
Most of us groan when we read things like A princess gets her education one knight at a time and I'm on a seafood diet. Every time I see food, I eat it.
In
an article about the wordplay in Shakespeare, Jem Bloomfield writes
that puns "rely on a sudden link being shown between two ideas which
have previously been completely separate." That's the beauty of them:
they're a shock to the system. As Bloomfield notes, the reaction is
both visceral and intuitive.
If a comedienne winks at her audience and says, Hubby and I always make love on hump day,
the resulting laugh will be accompanied by a jolt, a moment of
dissonance while the audience bridges the ambiguous meanings of hump
and laughs. Once you see it, you'll see it where it wasn't obvious
before, as in when somebody says, Now that I'm pregnant, I'll never get over the hump.
When
I write, I seldom plan a pun or a symbolic double meaning in the
sentence I'm about to create. Yet puns and double meanings flow
naturally as I type. It's as though my muse or my subconscious mind see
dozens of connections between words that my conscious mind doesn't see
as I think about what I'm going to write next. I grew up around people
who made puns, so perhaps I was simply brainwashed.
Author
Sunetra Gupta writes that "What words conceal is as important as what
they reveal." This is a very important truth, one that it often takes
writers years to discover because we are taught in school to find the
best word, the most precise word. One almost has to flip a mental
switch to see the humor and/or symbolism lurking within puns and
passages that have multiple meanings. Gupta goes on to say "Although
the essence of raw communication may be clarity, in literature it is
the inexact and the imprecise that allow us to push forward the
boundaries of human experience and cognition."
Pushing those boundaries occurs during the inevitable groan that follows a line like I couldn't quite remember how to throw a boomerang, but eventually it came back to me.
We may laugh or smile, but we think about the matter as well, sometimes
a little and sometimes a lot. Double meanings, whether silly or deep,
can make both the reader and the writer step outside the box or even
throw caution to the wind and destroy the envelope. Let the pun shine
in.
Ice Water? Get some Onions - that'll make your eyes water. -- Groucho Marks
--Malcolm Campbell, author of "Jock Stewart and the Missing Sea of Fire," a comedy/thriller filled with more puns and groans per square smile than the law allows in some states.