Punny Comments

Learned Vol. 4, Issue 25

This week: The lowly pun. It’s the most universal form of humor, at least in written form. And just how many types are there anyhow? We find out, then we take a look at some album puns, toss around a few footnotes, and we’re out. Here we go.

If there’s a universal form of humor, it’s slapstick. Nothing is funnier to people across linguistic and cultural barriers than watching someone slip on a banana peel. But slapstick is really hard to write. Reading a Charlie Chaplin script is not nearly as funny as watching it play out on the screen. Just ask anyone who’s had to sit through a child explaining the best parts of a movie for the four-hundredth time. So, slapstick is a visual art.

But what is the literary equivalent? Is there a single form of humor that can transcend cultural and linguistic boundaries in the same way? Yes, there is and it's the humble, lowly, lowest-common-denominator of humor, the pun. (Of course, there is a caveat.)

All credit and / or blame to Hank Green via Tik Tok for this one.

Puns, in English, are kind of like playing a musical instrument - playing a few basic notes on most instruments doesn’t take very long to learn and not all that much skill. Playing a symphony on that same instrument is something that belongs to the realm of a dedicated few. And puns are similar. Every English-speaking child goes through a punning phase. Knock Knock jokes, at their core, are a kind of pun. For adults, though, puns come into and out of fashion on a regular basis, with the true wits among us capable of making the perfect pun into a timely punchline or sardonic aside.

But are they universal? Yes.

¹

Kind of. See, every language has wordplay

²

and that wordplay tends to fall into familiar patterns, of which punning is a relatively common one. It's just that (here's the caveat) what's funny in one culture’s language isn’t remotely humorous in another.

Here in Japan, where I live, puns are a favorite word game for students and scholars alike. There are even t.v. shows where the goal is just to come up with a better pun than the other team. In this respect, Japanese and English are similar. Where they differ is in the actual wording of the pun and in what the subject matter is. To a certain extent, the latter is defined by the former as it takes the right wrong-word to create a pun and if that word doesn't exist in a punable state in your language, no amount of artistry is going to make the pun work. All of which begs the question, just what is a pun?

Here's the Glossary of Literary Terms:

Pun (or paranomasia) denotes a play on words that are either identical in sound (homonyms) or very similar in sound, but are sharply diverse in significance.

³

Wikipedia breaks pun down further into several categories. The three most relevant for us here are these:

• Homophonic - where one word is replaced with another word that has the same sound, e.g. meat or meet.

• Homographic - where one word is replaced with another word that is spelled the same, e.g. bass guitar or bass fish.

• Homonymic - where one word is replaced with another word that is both spelled and pronounced the same but has different meanings, e.g. tell a lie vs. lie down

What we need now are examples. And, although English literature is full of them, we often see them in far more low-brow, everyday occurrences like advertising and marketing, both of which converge in one of my favorite sources of puns: album titles.

Throw a metaphorical rock at the internet and you'll find article after listicle like "Top 10: Album Pun Titles," and "The Greatest Rap Album Title Puns." Nothing wrong with that. Except. A lot of the titles on these lists aren't really puns. At least, not by the definitions listed above. Here's an example.

One of my favorite bands throughout my teens and twenties was Blink-182.

⁴

Their bratty, SoCal-flavored power-pop managed to both speak to me and about me more than I really like to admit sometimes. But, as with many bands of that era, album titles were used to telegraph just how "grown-up" the record was going to be. And when you had a record full of bratty pop songs about arrested development and bad dates, you had a record that just begged for a dirty pun title. In this case, the band released a pair of records like this, one after the other in 1999 and 2001, with Enema of the State and Take Off Your Pants and Jacket, respectively.

In my more pedantic moods, I argue that Enema is not really a pun. Instead, it’s a double-entendre. I mean, it’s funny, but the word “enema” is neither a homophone nor a homograph of any other word. And, even when pronounced quickly or with all the phonemes blended together, it’s hard to mistake it for the parent phrase, “enemy of the state.” Not to mention, it just doesn’t make much sense. It gets a lot of its humor from simple substitution.

Take Off Your Pants…on the other hand, is a near-perfect pun because the words “jack it” have a well-known slang meaning and are usually blended in such a way that makes it a perfect homophone for “jacket.” Right?

Well, pedantry is not a good look on anyone, least of all me, so whether both album titles are properly puns or not is mostly irrelevant. In the minds of the general public, they are as evidenced by the number of “Greatest Pun Album Titles of All Time” articles both records appear on. So, perhaps it’s time to broaden the definition of pun.

Even if we don't redefine pun, it remains that the pun is, as best we can tell, universal in human languages. We carry within us, as humans, the need to play with our words. Doing so helps us understand and communicate more. And if we can do that with a dose of good-natured bad-jokes, so much the better.

Stay Curious

J

Sidetracks:

The pun-as-album title is an underappreciated art. Dozens, if not hundreds, of bands, have tried this over the years, some to better effect than others. To my chagrin, I’m often so conscious of the possibility of a joke that I miss the joke by looking too hard for one. In other words, the joke is often not as good as I want it to be so I spend too long overanalyzing it and end up ruining it completely. Or sometimes I just don’t get it for far too damn long.

• Anyway, here’s a few favorites album title puns:

• David Bowie - Aladdin Sane

• Blink-182 - Take Off Your Pants and Jack It

• Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - From Her to Eternity

• De La Soul - Art Official Intelligence

• Radiohead - Hail to the Thief

• Jimmy Buffett - Last Mango in Paris

Footnotes:

1. Okay, I know. No generalizations. That said, the list of languages that do have puns and wordplay is enormously long and the list of languages that do not have wordplay non-existent. What is in between those two extremes is the very, very long list of languages for which it is unknown by the general public whether they have puns. And what I mean by this is that, if you want to know if Spanish has puns, finding a Spanish speaker to answer your question is fairly easy. However, if you want to know if the Arha language of New Caledonia has puns, finding one of the 35 remaining native speakers to answer your question is going to be much more difficult.

2. Yes, the number of exceptions to this is going to be legendarily long, but, well, just go with it for now.

3. I've been making an effort to bring more formal sources into my writing for the past couple of weeks and that's why I turned to the different dictionaries for my definitions. But, I have to say that, in this case, the clearest and best definitions came from Wikipedia. So, if you want a source for all this blather, go read their entry for pun. It's got some great examples if nothing else.

4. I still like them, but, with absolutely no shade at (guitarist) Matt Skiba, it's just not the same without Tom.