Think About It. Not Punny. With no TV in the “olden days” family fun was game time. There were playing cards, but not the standard deck. Face cards suggesting the invocation of “divine right of kings” was sacrilegious which precluded their presence in our manse. We settled for Flinch, a faceless pack with four suits of fourteen cards each. When consensus was required, our pasteboard preference was Authors, with Louisa May Alcott to Mark Twain providing competition for recalling their best works so we could collect the largest pile. However when it was my turn to choose, we’d play Anagrams for a spell, using the letters from one word to form another. Some get complicated, like William Shakespeare = I am a weakish speller. You may notice that was also a pun, whether you like it or not. Word play became my favorite pastime and seems to have remained so.This generation of Weavers grew up on Scrabble, which for some has morphed into Word Pro facilitating long-distance contests and communication. All of this leads us to examine what some call the “lowest form of humor”, a designation with which you might imagine I do not agree.
Choosing the unfailingly accurate arbiter of all things, I found lots of evidence to back my contention on Wikipedia. 1 Old Bill the bard himself was an “anagrammatist”, using his obviously ample vocabulary to provide sometimes hidden humor to his drama. Add other comedy writers like Oscar Wilde, George Carlin and Plautus to the ranks. They say the well-known Roman playwright would make up and change the meaning of words to create puns in Latin. Try it for fun.
Currently a fearsome male foursome gathers to play Bridge weekly at a local hotel. There’s traveler John, patient Dave, laugh-a-minute Ron and I don’t know how they talk about me when I’m gone. BTW, Ron’s email address starts with” suckfinger”. Far from punctilious, never known as a chicken, in seventh grade he probably held out his finger and said “pullet”. Would thirty days in the coop be inadequate punishment? You can also blame him for the following examples, translated into passable English.
An invisible man married an invisible woman. The kids weren’t much to look at either. I went to hunt for camouflage trousers the other day , but couldn’t find any. A dyslexic man walks into a bra. Finally (You hope.), Ron sent twenty different puns to his friends with the hope that at least ten of the puns would make them laugh. No pun in ten did.
Surely you agree that living would miss much of its punch if people were Not Punny Think About It. 1