Punny not funny...
Not all puns are designed to elicit a laugh -or a groan depending upon your opunion (ouch!). Some are just merely clever. Hogarth sent out a dinner invitation which pictured a knife, a fork, and a pie with three Greek letters: eta, beta, pi.
Though considered vile by many, punsters abounded in the 19th century. Charles Lamb declared he "never knew an enemy to puns who was not an ill-natured man." His penchant for puns was so pronounced that he wished "the last breath drawn in... might be through a pipe and exhaled in a pun. " He also considered the worst puns to be the best puns: "It is a pistol let off at the ear; not a feather to tickle the intellect."
Thomas Hood, according to some, was "the last great man who really employed the pun." His poetry was full of them as this excerpt illustrates:
So each one upwards in the air
His shot he did expend
And may all other duels have
This upshot at the end.
In later life, when an undertaker offered him his services, he quipped: "He is trying to urn a lively Hood."
Punstercide is justifiable...
While G.K. Chesterton may have considered the pun a perfect type of art in a primary sense, Oliver Wendell Holmes went as far in the opposite direction. In 'The Autocrat of The Breakfast Table' (1858), he states that killing a punster is justifiable if the pun is bad enough. "(Punsters) are like wanton boys that put coppers on the railroad tracks... their little trick may upset a freight train of conversation for the sake of a battered witticism."
Puns have survived to this day thanks in large part to the brilliant minds of Groucho Marx, Ogden Nash, Dorothy Parker, and James Thurber. Upon meeting T. S. Eliot, Marx said, "I discovered that Eliot and I had three things in common: (1) an affection for good cigars and (2) cats; and (3) a weakness for making puns- a weakness that for many years I have tried to overcome."
If you enjoyed this article then you'll want to read "The Oxford Guide To Word Games" (Compare Prices) by Tony Augarde.
