Norma Spudget and Him Kee Wee have known each other for more than two decades, during which time they have shared many a fine bottle and even more awful puns.Anyone For Punishment is a younger sister to their 'Mile High Club' creation Anyone For Tee (conceived in 2002 at 30,000 feet on board flight VS 27 from Gatwick to Orlando). But whereas Anyone For Tee blends golf and excruciating puns (in honour of their love of Led Zeppelin they dubbed it ‘Fairway to Heaven’), Anyone For Punishment does away with all the legwork and mental anguish of golf and cuts straight to the chase, or the crafting of puns, a discipline and sport admittedly less physical, but one that be practised anywhere and at any time.
Norma and Kee Wee are united in the belief that the enjoyment of puns - both writing and reading them - is an art that can bring pleasure to anyone with a sense of humour and a mildly masochistic or sadistic nature, and that the world would be a happier place if more people took up puns instead of guns.
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| Oscar Levant |
These words of Oscar Levant seem unfair to Punning - unless perhaps they glorify it. You don't need to be a writer of jokes to Pun; just an ability to see the two sides of a word or expression.
To those who believe it is criminal to 'abuse' words by twisting their context, we plead: "Guilty as charged," and accept a life of exile in a literary penal colony, where excruciating word torture is the daily ration, as our punishment. Mercifully, we would not be alone...
| Hanging is too good for a man who makes puns; he should be drawn and quoted. - Fred Allen |
The goodness of the true pun is in the direct ratio of its intolerability. - Edgar Allan Poe |
| Puns are the highest form of literature. - Alfred Hitchcock |
A good pun is its own reword. - Author Unknown |
| A pun is not bound by the laws which limit nicer wit. It is a pistol let off at the ear; not a feather to tickle the intellect. - Charles Lamb |
A pun is to wordplay what dominatrix sex is to foreplay - a stinging whip that elicits groans of guilty pleasure. - William Safire |
| A good pun may be admitted among the smaller excellencies of lively conversation. - James Boswell |
A pun is a short quip followed by a long groan. - Author Unknown |
About Puns
"To pun is to treat homonyms as synonyms, " according to Walter Redfern in Puns: More Senses Than One. Indeed.
But as Bill Shankley, manager of Liverpool Football Club from 1959 to 1974, once said, "Some people think football is a matter of life and death, but it is much more serious than that."
For those who might enjoy bringing some formality to our random collection of puns, we have listed below some of many possible categories into which puns might be grouped, according to their structure and delivery. We find it gratifying that scholars of rhetoric (among whom we definitely do not count ourselves) have studied the pun in its many forms as examples of the great art of discourse, and it is their terminology we use below, while stressing that our list of pun-types does not pretend to be exhaustive.
To those who have no wish to become pun-anoraks, we suggest you simply enjoy the puns which serve as examples below.
HOMOPHONIC - punning with words which sound alike but are not synonymous:
- Atheism is a non-prophet institution.
- Police were called to a kindergarten where a three-year-old was resisting a rest.
- I bet our butcher that he couldn’t reach the meat on the top shelf. He refused to take the bet, saying the steaks were too high.
HOMOGRAPHIC - punning with words which are spelled the same, but have different sounds and meanings:
- Corduroy pillows are making headlines.
- Did you hear about the optometrist who fell into a lens grinder and made a spectacle of himself?
- I asked the traffic warden, "Why can't I park my car here? The sign says 'Fine for Parking'."
HOMONYMIC [antanaclasis/word play/polysemy] - a combination of homographic and homophonic, where the pun resides in a single word. They can also be more complex, when the second part of the pun is in opposition to the first, as in the third example below:
- Being in politics is just like playing golf: you are trapped in one bad lie after another.
- I'm a light drinker. As soon as it gets light I start to drink. (W.C. Fields)
- When women go wrong, men go right after them. (Mae West)
COMPOUND - a combination of two or more puns:
- You can tune a guitar, but you can't tuna fish. Unless of course, you play bass.
- I find a lot of fractions rather vulgar, but with decimals I can see the point.
- The mother and father are quite clever, but the son's very bright.
RECURSIVE - when the pun at the end is dependent on an understanding of the build-up, sometimes fairly obscure:
- Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana. (Groucho Marx)
- Immanuel doesn't pun, he Kant. (Oscar Wilde)
- I'd like to go to Holland one day. Wooden shoe?
CHIASMUS - reversing the order of words in a phrase to create a new meaning. From the Greek for 'crosswise'. In some cases the reversed words are implied, not said, as in the second example below:
- It’s not the men in your life that matters, it’s the life in your men. (Mae West)
- A hard man is good to find. (Mae West)
- I'm not a writer with a drinking problem, I'm a drinker with a writing problem. (Dorothy Parker)
- A theatre critic is a man who leaves no turn unstoned.
- You can lead a whore to culture but you can't make her think. (attr. Dorothy Parker)
- A hangover is the wrath of grapes. (Dorothy Parker)
PORTMANTEAU - from the French word originally meaning an article of luggage with two compartments, this pun combines two or more words, or their sounds, to provide a new meaning:
- We're going on a booze cruise tomorrow. A sort of short alcoholiday.
- Tonight we ate spicy noodles out of a tin while an Indian holy man drank a bottle of fortified wine. A sort of Thai mee can guru downs port evening.
- A man died after jumping off a bridge in Paris. The inquest found he was in Seine.
DOUBLE ENTENDRE - a phrase constructed potentially to be understood in two ways, where the second meaning is a pun, often sexual in nature:
- If I said you had a beautiful body, would you hold it against me? (Groucho Marx)
- Before we go any further, Mr. Rumbold, Miss Brahms and I would like to complain about the state of our drawers. (Mrs Slocombe in Are You Being Served?)
- Marriage is a fine institution, but I’m not ready for an institution. (Mae West)
DAFFYNITION - a pun in which an ordinary word is given a new and twisted definition. The finest exponents of this are the teams on the BBC's 'I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue", in the round known as 'The Uxbrdige English Dictionary':
- Carmelite: a half-hearted Buddhist.
- Pasteurise: too far away to see.
- Coffee: someone who is coughed on.
ANADIPLOSIS - a pun employing repetition of the last word of one phrase at the beginning of a second phrase;
- Wales! Land of my Fathers! My fathers can keep it. (Dylan Thomas)
- Why should I care about posterity? What's posterity ever done for me? (Groucho Marx)
- Anything worth doing is worth doing slowly. (Mae West)
ANTISTASIS - where the pun depends on the repetition of a word or phrase in a different or opposing sense:
- A kleptomaniac is a person who helps himself because he can't help himself. (Henry Morgan)
- Why do so many people who can't write plays write plays? (James Thurber)
- Tell him I'm too f***ing busy. No, wait a minute, reverse that. (Dorothy Parker)
ASTEISMUS - when a statement is met with a mocking or facetious reply that forms a pun:
- I never forget a face, but in your case I'll make an exception. (Groucho Marx)
- My dog's got no nose. How does he smell? Horrible!
- She runs the gamut of emotions from A to B. (Dorothy Parker of Katherine Hepburn)
SPOONERISM - the transposition of a word, parts of a word or even a single letter to create a new phrase that has meaning and is witty. Invented (unintentionally) by the Reverend William Archibald Spooner, a fellow of New College, Oxford from 1867 to 1924. Whether or not the many examples attributed to him are wishful thinking by his students or real lapses matters not to pun-lovers:
- You have hissed all my mystery lectures, and were caught fighting a liar in the quad. Having tasted two worms, you will leave by the next town drain. (attr. Rev. Spooner)
- Three cheers for our queer old dean! (attr. Rev. Spooner)
- I'd rather have a bottle in front of me, than a frontal lobotomy. (attr. to W.C. Fields)
WELLERISM - tamed after the character Sam Weller in Charles Dickens' The Pickwick Papers. These puns work by taking well-known sayings, often clichés, and putting them into inappropriate context:
- "We'll have to rehearse that," said the undertaker as the coffin fell out of the car.
- "So I see," said the blind carpenter as he picked up his hammer and saw.
- The best way to communicate with a fish is to drop it a line.
TOM SWIFTY - sometimes considered a variant of the Wellerism, these are named after the Tom Swift series of books, in which the writer went to great lengths to avoid monotonous repetition of the lone word "said" through the use adverbs or qualifying phrases:
- "I'll have the lamb," she said sheepishly.
- "I have no flowers," he said lackadaisically.
- "I wonder if this radium is radioactive?" asked Marie curiously.
RIDDLE - a pun based on a question (conundrum) or statement (enigma) that offers a secondary or hidden meaning in the answer or solution:
- How do you make Holy Water? You boil the hell out of it.
- What Do You Call Santa's Helpers? Subordinate Clauses.
- Why are sandwich fillings so stupid? Because they're in bread.
KNOCK, KNOCK - a facetious conversation between two people, one of whom is outside the door and provides the pun in his final answer:
- Knock, knock. Who’s there? Noah. Noah who? Noah good place we can get something to eat?
- Knock, knock. Who’s there? Ivor. Ivor who? Ivor you let me in or I`ll climb through the window.
- Knock, knock. Who’s there? Doctor. Doctor who? How did you guess?
And last, but not least, a couple of long ones...
SHAGGY DOG - typically a long-winded and improbable story leading up to a preposterous pun:
- I was looking at possible future careers, so Dad offered to take me with him to the London Bullion Market where he works as a trader. We ran into Dad's good mate and golfing partner Ben, who asked what I was doing there. "I'm trying to decide what sort of job I want to get into, and Dad thought it would be good for me to experience the trading floor," I said. "Well, you should talk to the tall, fair-haired lad over there, he could help you," said Ben, as he took a call on his phone and ran off, gesticulating wildly. "So who's the chap Ben recommended to me, Dad?", I asked. "Which one? Oh, you mean Ciggy?" Dad replied. "That's an odd name," I said. "Well, he's Ben's son and hedges gold."
FEGHOOT - a variant of the shaggy dog pun. Usually a short story that leads to a punchline which is a twist on a well-known saying, named after the science-fiction stories published as 'Through Time and Space with Ferdinand Feghoot:
- The Rolling Stones were performing in a huge sports stadium and, ticket prices being what they are, many in the audience were middle-aged rockers with large waistlines who had difficulty sitting in the tight arena seats. Several complained and shouted to Mick Jagger on stage who agreed to get the manager to find seats that would be comfortable for the overweight fans. Unfortunately, they were no wide seats to be had and after the manager had told Jagger the bad news, he had to go to the microphone and make a sad announcement. "I've tried and I've tried and I've tried and I've tried, but I can't get no fatties’ section."
